Building the World’s Largest Community-Powered Aviation Safety DePIN Network on the Permanent Cloud

Derad’s Mission & Vision

Derad Network is on a mission to build the world’s largest community-driven ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) DePIN network, one that tracks aircraft data in real time and stores it permanently. Unlike existing systems that rely on volunteer-operated antennas with limited coverage and uptime, Derad introduces an incentivized, decentralized approach where anyone can set up an antenna, contribute data, and earn rewards. The goal of their efforts are to enhance aviation safety and transparency, not just in populated areas, but equally in rural ones.

ADS-B System Diagram

The Challenge: Centralization, Cost, and Control

Before integrating with AR.IO, Derad struggled with key infrastructure challenges using traditional cloud storage solutions:

• Centralization: Centralized storage providers like S3 conflicted with Derad’s core DePIN ethos. The idea of centralized control over community-collected data was a deal-breaker.
  
  

• Cost: ADS-B networks generate huge volumes of data, and storing historical data meant growing monthly bills that threatened scalability.
  
  

• Access: With traditional providers, Derad would have had centralized authority over who could access the data—contradicting their commitment to open, community-owned infrastructure.

The Solution: Utilizing AR.IO’s Permanent & Decentralized Stack

By moving their infrastructure to the Permanent Cloud Network, Derad solved all three problems with a single integration:

• Decentralized Device Storage: Network nodes are able to independently archive device data to Arweave without relying a centralized service provided by the network.
  
  

• Pay once, store forever (with cost off-set by $ARIO rewards): Leveraging Arweave’s pay-once-store-forever model, Derad now archives historical ADS-B data without worrying about increasing costs and they are using AR.IO network protocol rewards to off-set future fees.
  
  

• Decentralized data access via Gateways and ArNS: Device data is accessible via AR.IO’s network of > 600 gateways and made easily available via their decentralized flight tracker built on Arweave Name System (ArNS), this ensures long-term, permissionless access guarantees without relying on centralized infrastructure.

  
  

Integration

“Overall, integrating ARIO solutions into our codebase was easy. Everything is well-documented with clear examples, and the tools themselves are very straightforward to use. Since ARIO is compatible with Node.js and TypeScript, building web applications with it was a smooth process. Also, support from the team has been excellent.” - Derad Team

How Derad Uses AR.IO

Derad has deeply integrated the AR.IO across its entire ecosystem:

• Deradar - Decentralized Flight Tracking Portal: Derad built a fully decentralized flight tracking portal similar to FlightRader on ArNS that streams real-time data from ADS-B devices and makes Arweave archives easily available for historical analysis and replays.
  
  

• Turbo Node Integration and credit sharing: Derad integrated data uploads via Turbo directly into their nodes to enable decentralized uploading of device data and configured a novel credit sharing mechanism that allows them to reinvest network rewards to off-set upload costs.
  
  

• Optimised Derad Gateway: While the decentralized network ensures long-term access, Derad deployed and optimized their own gateway to enable an enterprise QoS for their data whilst earning network rewards in $ARIO are reinvested back to off-set uploads costs in the network.
  
  

As a result, DeRadar is now of the top 4 data uploads by volume on a rolling 7 day basis and growing fast. See a screenshot below of their Flight Tracking Portal.

Impact & Metrics

Even in testnet, the impact has been substantial:

• 40 active ADS-B Devices in the network tracking over 2,500 planes in real-time

• A total of 79,673 unique aircraft, 172,434 individual flights and 10,738,170 data points

• 25,281 data packages permanently stored via Turbo, 9.71 GB in total at a cost of ~ 161 USD

• Achieved 95% historical data availability in testnet

• Mainnet goals: 99.9% data availability and thousands of community-deployed antennas

What AR.IO Enabled

Derad unlocked:

• A permanent archive for global aviation telemetry

• A censorship-resistant, open-access layer for all collected data

• A scalable economic model for network growth without compounding cloud costs

All of this allowed the Derad team to focus on delivering value to users, empowering them, and building out their core DePIN infrastructure.

What’s Next?

This is just the beginning, on the journey to mainnet Derad are also currently exploring:

• Exploring ways to optimize how they’re storing, indexing and serving data to enable dramatically improved query performance and flexibility.

• Storing, encrypting and providing decentralized access control of enriched datasets on Arweave to provide an enterprise API service for their ABD-S Flight-tracking data using their AR.IO Gateway.

We’re excited to continue working closely with the team to help unlock new value and use-case for their DePIN data on AR.IO Network.

Explore Derad

🔗 Visit derad.network
🌐 View live data on DeRadar - Decentralized Aircraft Tracking

Partner with AR.IO

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