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AR.IO Gateways
What are AR.IO Gateways?
A gateway’s primary role in the Arweave ecosystem is to act as a bridge between the Arweave network and the outside world, or more specifically, the permaweb.
This means that a gateway's main task is to make it easier for users to interact with the Arweave network by simplifying the technical processes of writing, reading, and discovering data on the blockweave.
How do AR.IO gateways interact with Arweave?
Gateways are special infrastructure tools that sit above the base storage layer and allow users to access and query the information stored on Arweave.
They are specialized nodes responsible for data retrieval, caching, and serving as well as indexing transactions into a database that can be easily queried at scale. These functions are not performed by the Arweave mining nodes which are optimized for securing the Layer 1 blockweave and replicating information throughout the network.
Practically, they open the doors to development as developers can interact with blockchain technology without having to have blockchain technical skills.
What types of gateways can be run in the AR.IO network?
Gateways can be run by a wide range of people for various purposes.
They can be small projects hosted by developers and hobbyists at home, or larger platforms and applications run by small teams or even big companies.
What are some of the benefits of operating an AR.IO gateway?
AR.IO gateways offer many new benefits and improve the general capabilities of Arweave gateways by:
Allowing flexibility and customization to run gateways at different sizes to meet specific needs, whether for small projects or large-scale business applications.
Providing tools to collect and use data for monitoring and alerts.
Making it easy to route friendly subdomain names to Arweave transactions through integration with the Arweave Name System (ArNS).
Offering configurable content moderation policies.
Join In!
The best way to learn more about AR.IO and the permaweb is with AR.IO Experience: Our incentivized program that rewards people who engage with the ar.io ecosystem.
Engage in quests to gain Experience Points (EXP) - onchain tokens that represent potential eligibility for the AR.IO airdrop.
In other words, EXP lets you level up for the IO token mainnet airdrop!
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