Up more than 50% in 24 hours, Arweave is going to be an "Ethereum killer" again?

Arweave, a Blockchain storage protocol, released the public Testnet Arweave AO for designing computing layers for social media, AI. Then the price of its native Token AR broke through one after another, and the current AR broke through $28, up 23% in 24 hours.
Zhixiong Pan, founder of ChainFeeds, posted on X that "Arweave is the most promising cryptographic protocol that makes large-scale decentralization data storage a reality. The only reason we live a very different life from our ancestors is that we have inherited and used the knowledge and experience accumulated by mankind over tens of thousands of years of history. Perhaps this new technology will allow the revival of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to be equipped with an ENIAC. 」
So what mission does Arweave's Testnet want to accomplish this time? And Arweave founder Williams even said that Arweave AO is confident to compete with Ethereum and calls itself an "Ethereum competitor".
Arweave was founded in 2017, as a Blockchain-based file storage protocol, Arweave has the characteristics of one-time payment, permanent storage of files, through a simple set of economic incentive rules, so that Miners can store data for a long time. In 2021, there were more Long than 200 applications based on the Arweave network, covering Long categories such as Social Web, infrastructure, content distribution, and authentication tools.
Over the next two years, Arweave's business data grew dramatically, influenced by the Non-fungible Token market and the Web3 creator economy. At the end of 2022, Arweave's data storage volume nearly tripled compared to the same period the previous year, up 192% year-over-year. At that time, Arweave's 30-day network revenue was close to $300,000, and it once topped the list of Web3 basic service agreements, far surpassing star storage and DePin projects such as Storj and Helium.
However, after entering 2023, the growth rate of Arweave's storage business has slowed down significantly, and so far, Arweave's data storage quality is 157TB, an increase of only 30% in the past year, and the revenue brought by the storage business is not as good as before.
According to a 2023 Arweave Ecosystem Report written by the PermaDAO community, Arweave's overall performance in 2023 is not as good as in 2022, with a total of 32.96 TiB for the whole year, an drop of 55.78% year-on-year. In 2023, monthly NAS hovered between 2–4 TiB overall, with the lowest amount of NAS at 1.43 TiB in June.
At the same time, the Arweave network is exceptionally active in 2023, and the growth of contracts is also one of the key indicators. Contract growth in 2023 is a huge increase compared to 2022, with a 1,063% year-over-year increase.
These data indicators reflect the dilemma faced by Arweave: although there are Long projects using Arweave storage services, there are still few projects that are developed entirely on Arweave, and it is difficult for Arweave to form network effects through storage alone. But on the other hand, the rapid growth of new contracts is proof that Arweave still has a lot of promise.
It's no secret that low-cost on-chain storage is critical to the success of Blockchain and Web3. Arweave founder Sam Williams, in a conversation with ArDrive founder Philip Mataras, revealed a striking cost comparison: storing a 13 GB file on Arweave costs only $87, while storing the same data costs about $35,620,000 on Bitcoin and $780,000,000 on Ethereum.
As a permanent storage project, Arweave itself is an arbitrarily visible, open and transparent permanent storage network, and the storage-based Consensus paradigm SCP can already be scaled off-chain without losing the final confirmation of the chain, as long as it conforms to the expansion theory of SCP, it can be used as part of Arweave to achieve specific functions.
It's fair to say that Arweave doesn't have a scaling problem, and PermaDAO author Azriel thinks it's only a matter of time before Arweave moves from behind the scenes to the front of the stage. The public chain field has long faced the problem of computing and storage costs, and Arweave has shown its potential in promoting the full decentralization of DApps, Arweave is positioned not only as a Decentralization storage platform, but also as a Web3.0 full-stack protocol that supports the full decentralization of DApps.
After the release of Arweave AO, Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, said in an interview, "We built a hyper-parallel computer, a computer that can run any number of threads in parallel at the same time, and it's incredibly scalable. 」
Not only the founders, but also the Arweave community, which is regarded by the community and developers as a data availability layer, directly carrying the development needs of Dapps. In a space in 2022, Xiong Wei, the founder of everFinance in the Arweave ecosystem, joked that "the beginning of Arweave is the end game of Ethereum".
It is difficult to conclude that the launch of Arweave AO has had a Long impact on the current public chain pattern, but after nearly two years of planning, Arweave has completed the transformation from storage business to Web3 full-stack protocol, and the 24-hour increase of 50% is enough to attract attention. It is foreseeable that the entry of Arweave will make the competitive landscape of public chains more exciting.
(Source: Joyce, Kaori)