What came first: the chicken or the egg? The chain or the block? The 1 or the 0?

These philosophical questions can be debated from various angles but within the Arweave ecosystem we know what came first: the Arweave protocol.

The Arweave protocol is the innovative blockchain technology that makes permanent storage possible. It is built on the base of an economic endowment and a ‘blockweave’ that bring permanent data storage for any type of file.

Excitement for Arweave gained momentum after its initial launch in 2017 and many developers started to dream of the possibility of what could be built with permanent data.  Permanent, unruggable data with location independence, immutability, open source architecture, low-to-no maintenance cost, and no more broken links all add up to a new paradigm for app development. 

While the initial prospects were intriguing, it soon became clear that the ecosystem needed additional components before seeing widespread real-life adoption and use. 

Moving Day

What was needed to level the Arweave ecosystem for real world adoption?

Building a global community of miners to store Arweave data and developing software like block explorers was a start. The hyper parallel compute power of AO has added a new component. Another critical and overlooked aspect of Arweave infrastructure was also missing.

David Whittington, one of the main architects of the AR.IO decentralized gateway network, has a helpful analogy for this situation:

Let’s say you are moving, and you’re paying a friend to store your stuff.

You say to your friend, “I’ll give you this money and you’ll store my stuff.”

Your friend agrees. But he also happens to be very literal and simply takes your stuff and puts it in a big dumpster filled with other debris. Later you return and say, “Give me my stuff back.”

And the friend says, “Woah — you just told me to store it, not to give it back.”

While the Arweave protocol had been optimized and perfected to store data, it was not optimized or designed to serve that data in the performant manner needed by apps and expected from users.  

To address this need for performant data access, the Arweave founding team created arweave.net - a community gateway focused on accessing and serving the data stored on Arweave.

While necessary for adoption, this centralized gateway quickly became expensive to operate and heavily relied on as the Arweave network grew. Centralized, expensive, and depended on are not long-term solutions for a decentralized network!

Arweave required a better way to index and retrieve that data (in a decentralized and incentivized way) if it was going to scale.

Enter AR.IO.  

AR.IO: data IN and OUT of Arweave

AR.IO is the decentralized, incentivized gateway network that facilitates getting data to and from the Arweave protocol. 

David W. finished his analogy above with:

Gateways are all about getting your stuff back. This process needs to be incentivized. And ideally you don’t store it in a dumpster. You store it in boxes with labels. You have some way of indexing it so people can find the things they want. And that’s what a good gateway does for you.

Gateways are important because the Arweave network is already storing a massive amount of data: around 9 Billion transactions and 300 PiB of data as of September 2024. Retrieving and interacting with this data directly from Arweave is complex and inefficient for everyday users. 

Gateways make this interaction much easier by providing a simple interface for reading, writing, and searching the stored information, or what we call it - the permaweb.

In other words, AR.IO makes the vision for the permaweb - a permanent, decentralized internet - real for everyone. Builders can build, and user can use an improved internet that will take away many of the pain points of the current internet, which are many.

For this reason, the AR.IO network is arguably the most important piece of infrastructure in the Arweave ecosystem next to the original storage protocol.

The Arweave protocol itself does not provide an incentive for permanent data to be served, but AR.IO does. Gateways are modular and can be scaled up so modern apps have the fast downloading, data indexing, and robust querying they need to be viable.

Arweave and AR.IO: Perfect Lego Blocks

In a recent interview with Internet Explorers, Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, spoke about the Arweave protocol and how permanent storage was possible.

After listening to Sam’s explanation the perceptive interviewer said: “That is all good, but what about serving data? That is the expensive part”

Sam then launched into an explanation of AR.IO and how it works with Arweave:

To have a working ecosystem for permanent data you needed both components of storage and serving data. Arweave is the decentralized and incentivized protocol for storing data and AR.IO is the the decentralized and incentivized protocol for indexing and serving that data.

Together, they are Lego blocks that snap together and provide developers with what they need to build a new generation of apps that leverage permanent, immutable data.