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What Is Arweave?

Arweave is a decentralized storage network designed to keep data online permanently. Users pay a single upfront fee in AR to store a file, and an on-chain endowment funds miners to keep replicating that file across the network for centuries. Arweave hosts what its community calls the Permaweb: a permanent, cryptographically verifiable archive of websites, datasets, NFTs, social posts, and AI model weights, all addressable by content hash.

Arweave was founded by Sam Williams in 2017, with the mainnet (then called Archain) going live in mid-2018. The project rebranded to Arweave and raised funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. Williams remains the public face of the project and leads Forward Research, the development entity behind much of Arweave's recent ecosystem work and the AO computer.

Arweave is technically a "blockweave" rather than a traditional blockchain. Each new block references both the previous block and a randomly chosen prior block, and a miner must prove they hold a copy of the chosen prior block to produce a valid new block. This mechanism, called Succinct Proofs of Random Access (SPoRA), economically incentivizes miners to keep all historical data replicated across the network rather than just the recent state. Arweave has gone through several mining upgrades, including the 2.6 release that moved toward a packing-based scheme optimized for hard-drive sequential access rather than GPUs.

The economics rely on an on-chain endowment. When a user uploads data, they pay an amount of AR sized to the file. A small portion pays the miner who includes the upload in a block, and the bulk is deposited into the endowment. As storage costs fall over time, the endowment is sized to pay out small annual fees to miners for centuries, even under pessimistic assumptions about future storage prices. The result is a one-time payment model that aims to outlive any single operator.

AR has a maximum supply of approximately 66 million tokens, with about 55 million distributed at launch and the remainder unlocking as block rewards on a long emission schedule. AR is used to pay for storage, reward miners, and serve as the native unit of account on Arweave. Many applications abstract AR away from end users by accepting other tokens or fiat and converting under the hood.

A major recent direction for the ecosystem is AO, the "hyperparallel computer" launched by the Arweave team in 2024. AO is an Erlang-inspired actor-model compute layer that uses Arweave as its data backbone. Processes on AO can run arbitrarily long-lived, message-passing programs whose state and inputs are stored on Arweave, with no shared global execution. AO has positioned Arweave at the center of a decentralized AI and agent narrative, with an AR-paired AO token introduced via a fair-launch distribution model.

On the application layer, Arweave hosts a wide range of projects, including the social network and content publishing tool Mirror, decentralized social platforms, NFT metadata for major Solana and Ethereum collections, the Permaweb hosting service ArDrive, and dataset archives used by AI and research teams.

Getting Started With Arweave

You can store data on Arweave directly with a wallet, or interact with the Permaweb via apps:

  1. Step 1: Create a Wander Wallet (formerly ArConnect) or another Arweave wallet, and back up the keyfile or seed phrase.
  2. Step 2: Acquire AR on an exchange and withdraw to your Arweave address. Even small amounts of AR cover many uploads.
  3. Step 3: Use a Permaweb app such as ArDrive (file storage) or Mirror (publishing) to upload data; the app handles paying AR fees and pinning the upload.
  4. Step 4: To build on Arweave, integrate the JavaScript SDK or use Bundlr/Irys for high-throughput uploads paid in AR, ETH, MATIC, or other supported tokens.

How to Get an Arweave Wallet?

AR is the native asset of the Arweave network. Several wallets support it:

Wander Wallet

Wander (formerly ArConnect) is the most popular Arweave browser extension wallet. It supports AR, AO tokens, and signing transactions for Permaweb apps directly in the browser.

Beacon Wallet

Beacon is a mobile-friendly Arweave wallet with strong support for AO and a clean interface for newcomers to the ecosystem.

Official Arweave Web Wallet

The arweave.app web wallet is a no-install option that runs entirely in the browser and works well for occasional uploads or quick balance checks.

Hardware Wallets

Direct hardware wallet support for AR is limited; most large holders rely on cold-stored keyfiles, custodial accounts at exchanges, or multisig setups managed via Forward Research tooling.

Arweave Resources

How to Buy Arweave?

AR is listed on a wide range of centralized and decentralized exchanges:

Centralized Exchanges

AR is available on Binance, Coinbase (regional availability varies), Kraken, Bybit, OKX, KuCoin, Bitget, Gate, and others. Common pairs include AR/USDT, AR/USDC, and AR/BTC.

Decentralized Exchanges

Wrapped AR trades against ETH and stablecoins on Ethereum DEXs such as Uniswap. Native AR can also be purchased through Permaswap, an AO-based DEX integrated with the Arweave ecosystem.

After buying, AR can be moved to an Arweave wallet to pay for storage or AO usage, or held long-term in cold storage as a bet on the Permaweb.

Latest Arweave News

The most consequential recent development for Arweave is the launch of the AO computer, which dramatically expanded the network's product surface from a pure storage protocol into a general-purpose compute and agent platform. AO has driven significant new attention and developer activity, with the AO token launching via a fair-distribution model paid out to AR holders and stETH stakers.

On the storage side, the Arweave network has continued to ship mining and protocol upgrades that improve replication economics and lower data costs. Arweave-hosted datasets, archives, and NFT metadata have become foundational infrastructure for many other crypto applications. Following the Arweave and AO blogs is the best way to keep up with protocol upgrades and ecosystem launches.