Arweave’s Evolution with AO Technology
Arweave, a decentralized storage service, launched its mainnet on November 18, 2018. Over more than five years, it underwent 13 major upgrades. However, these upgrades did not significantly strengthen Arweave’s market position. In 2023, the growth of Arweave’s storage business slowed down, with monthly network storage hovering between 2-4TiB, and the lowest being 1.43TiB in June. The total storage for the year was 32.96TiB, which pales in comparison to Filecoin’s over 1.8 EiB (1EiB = 1,048,576 TiB), indicating Arweave’s struggle to compete in decentralized storage.
AO, an Actor Oriented computing system running on Arweave, is designed to host an unlimited number of parallel processes that coordinate through an open messaging layer. Its core features are the infinite scalability of computational power and the verifiability and reproducibility of computation results, minimizing trust. AO consists of processes and messages, along with three key roles: Scheduling Units (SU), Computing Units (CU), and Messenger Units (MU).
AO’s Competitive Edge
AO differs from high-performance parallel blockchains and decentralized computing protocols like Akash by offering a message-passing parallel computing architecture and separating the functions of AR and AO. This modular structure allows for infinite horizontal scalability and ensures verifiable computations without the need for consensus on state, only on the order and storage of data.
The Flourishing AO Ecosystem
Although still in its infancy, the AO ecosystem is rapidly developing. It has established foundational infrastructure and financial systems, including cross-chain bridges, oracles, wallets, AMMs, stablecoin protocols, and applications in gaming, social media, and AI.
AO and AI: A Synergistic Relationship
AO’s design, based on the Actor model, aligns closely with AI research, making it an attractive platform for hosting AI models and applications. AO enables on-chain AI models to be verifiable and integrated with smart contracts, expanding AI’s use in the crypto world.
Tokenomics and Market Analysis
As of May 30, 2024, AO announced the upcoming launch of the $AO token, with a release date set for June 13. The $AR token, related to the project, remains a speculative asset until the $AO token generation event (TGE). $AR has a total supply of 66 million, with 55 million already in circulation and the remainder allocated for mining rewards. The tokenomics of $AR involve a storage endowment mechanism, where a portion of storage fees goes into a fund to ensure profitability for miners.
In summary, the introduction of AO technology has revitalized Arweave’s storage protocol, transforming it from a mere ‘hard drive’ into a powerful, verifiable computing environment. This has led to a significant increase in Arweave’s token value and the development of a robust ecosystem that promises to unlock the full potential of decentralized storage. The integration of AI and finance within the AO ecosystem, termed AgentFi, is particularly noteworthy, as it leverages AI’s reasoning capabilities to create complex financial strategies akin to those of a fund manager. The AO ecosystem’s growth is expected to further enhance Arweave’s storage business, with the self-built CPU unlocking the potential of the ‘hard drive
