Arweave (AR) Application | The ecosystem is gradually maturing, far more than just decentralized storage.

As the Arweave ecosystem continues to develop, more and more ecosystem applications are no longer limited to the storage field.

(This article is authorized to be reprinted from BlockBeats, the original title is "The current Arweave ecosystem applications are far more than just storage," original article here)

In the minds of many, Arweave has always been known for providing low-cost permanent storage services. However, as the Arweave ecosystem matures, new application forms based on Arweave technology have begun to emerge.

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Can you imagine minting and trading NFTs directly on Arweave? Or paying ERC20 tokens at zero cost on Arweave, and converting these assets into stablecoins directly on Arweave's native trading platform?

This article will introduce readers to more new application scenarios in the Arweave ecosystem through several typical applications.

1. Minting and Trading NFTs

Previously, the only connection between Arweave and NFTs was to help other NFT projects store metadata. However, using Arweave's technology, it is entirely possible to directly build a complete NFT trading platform. Let's take a look at the recent popular music NFT platform, Pianity, and analyze the logic behind its construction.

Pianity is a music NFT minting and trading platform that helps creators tokenize their music and sell it as NFTs to generate continuous revenue. So, do the NFTs traded on Pianity use the familiar ERC721 standard?

First, let's visit Pianity's homepage and randomly click on a music NFT. You can listen to the song and view its basic information on the details page.

At the bottom left corner of the details page, there is an Arweave storage transaction link. Clicking on it will take you to the browser interface of that transaction.

In this transaction, the music audio file is permanently stored on the Arweave chain. Additionally, in the Input field of the transaction, the mint function from the Pianity smart contract is called to mint new NFTs. It can be seen that 100 NFTs were minted, and the copyright owner's address is: wigfR4Dm76tDOTz8wjhJNauHUQc493Mdy8YFsFhwVRw.

The NFT contract address that was called: SJ3l7474UHh3Dw6dWVT1bzsJ-8JvOewtGoDdOecWIZo, seems to be the minting address for all NFTs in Pianity.

Next, let's click on the link of this NFT contract address (https://viewblock.io/arweave/address/SJ3l7474UHh3Dw6dWVT1bzsJ-8JvOewtGoDdOecWIZo) to enter the corresponding browser interface.

In this interface, you can not only see all transactions related to the NFT contract but also access the complete code of the contract and the latest state of the contract (such as the latest owner information of a specific NFT).

By clicking on the STATE button on the smart contract interface, you can query the owner's information.

Throughout the entire process of minting or trading NFTs on Pianity, there is no involvement of other public chains, nor the common metadata fields used for storing multimedia files. The entire process of minting NFTs involves sending a transaction to the NFT contract on Arweave, minting new NFTs while simultaneously saving the song's audio file on the chain.

By consulting Pianity's official documentation, it is revealed that Pianity uses a new NFT standard built on Arweave. This standard, compared to the familiar ERC721 protocol, stands out for fundamentally solving the issue of off-chain storage of NFT metadata.

Previously, NFTs in Ethereum needed to use metadata fields to point to off-chain storage addresses due to the high on-chain storage costs. However, the NFT standard built on Arweave naturally benefits from low-cost on-chain storage. Therefore, in the Arweave NFT standard, content and NFT are truly integrated into an indivisible whole. This standard is also known as Atomic NFT.

Atomic NFT resolves the biggest trust issue in traditional NFT standards. Under the Atomic NFT standard, users no longer need to worry about content storage issues. As long as the NFT held in the user's address exists, the stored music content will also exist. This further reduces the trust cost for users during NFT transactions. Users no longer need to understand complex concepts such as metadata and various storage methods, making the transaction process more straightforward and achieving true trustless transactions.

For creators in the future who primarily produce content in text, audio, or even video formats, the Atomic NFT standard based on Arweave technology undoubtedly creates favorable conditions for the future development of the industry.

2. Creating Profit-Sharing Tokens for Smart Contracts

Just as there will be a new NFT standard in the Arweave ecosystem, Arweave also has its own ERC20 token format. This new token standard is called Profit Sharing Token (PST).

Developers can set up corresponding PST tokens when deploying smart contracts and agree that PST holders will share gas fees generated by the contract in the future. Therefore, the more a smart contract deployed on Arweave is used, the higher the intrinsic value of its PST tokens.

Many native Arweave ecosystem projects have already issued their own PST tokens. As shown in the image below, Verto, a PST trading platform, has issued the VRT token, and ArDrive, a cloud storage application based on Arweave, has issued the ARDRIVE token, both of which operate under the PST model.

This token construction model provides developers with more channels to capture value. Even if an application developed is widely used, the developer can earn stable income through PST token capture, even without designing an elaborate token economic model. This way, developers can earn a stable income solely through PST token capture, even without designing a sophisticated token economic model.

However, the development of PST tokens is still in its early stages. As shown in the image, the total number of PST tokens supported by trading platforms is currently only 29, and most of them have low trading volumes and hardly any presence in the market. Therefore, PST tokens seem more like a technical reserve prepared in advance for the future prosperity of the Arweave ecosystem and may play a significant role in the near future.

3. Establishing an Asset Trading Platform

Yes, on Arweave, a storage-based public chain, developers can also establish independent decentralized asset trading platforms.

Verto is currently the only trading platform built on Arweave for trading PST tokens. When you open Verto's website, you can see that its overall style is based on the black-and-white minimalist style of the Arweave ecosystem. In addition to displaying basic information about the login address on the homepage, there are price trends of several common tokens and an interface displaying NFTs stored in the address.

If you need to conduct asset trading, you can click on the Swap button at the top of the page.

In Verto's trading interface, it is almost identical to the familiar Uniswap frontend. It supports various assets, including Arweave's native token AR and various PST tokens issued by ecosystem applications.

As Verto is currently undergoing an overall upgrade, actual trading demonstrations cannot be conducted. However, based on the official demo video, Verto's trading experience is essentially similar to Ethereum's trading platforms. Additionally, Verto uses the AMM trading mechanism that we are familiar with. In other words, if no one tells you that it is built on Arweave, ordinary users may not notice any significant differences.

From Verto's trading records before the upgrade, it can be seen that the trading volume of Verto is not very active at the moment. However, this does not mean that Verto's product is not excellent. After all, the entire Arweave ecosystem is still in its early stages, and there are not many PST assets available for trading on Verto. On the contrary, if the Arweave ecosystem is expected to flourish in the future, foundational infrastructure like Verto will undoubtedly be an essential presence.

4. Free On-Chain Payments

Free on-chain payments may initially sound like a marketing gimmick since any application interacting with a public chain theoretically cannot achieve true free transactions. However, the on-chain payment protocol everPay, developed based on Arweave, has almost achieved this seemingly impossible goal.

Let's experience the specific usage process of the everPay product before delving into how everPay achieves free payments.

First, when you arrive at the application's wallet interface, you can see the list of assets that everPay already supports for recharging. Besides Arweave's native token AR, the list includes mainstream assets coming from Ethereum through cross-chain transfers (currently does not cover Arweave's native PST tokens).

Clicking on the recharge button will prompt you to log in to the wallet. Although it is a native Arweave ecosystem application, everPay supports both ArConnect and Ethereum wallet logins.

Users needing to recharge Ethereum assets can first log in to their Ethereum wallet. The subsequent cross-chain recharge process is similar to a regular transfer payment process. Users select the asset and quantity, confirm and pay the gas fee (the only part of the everPay process that requires payment of Ethereum gas fees for cross-chain transfers), and after a short wait, the transferred asset balance can be seen in the everPay account.

After successful recharging, you can enter the interface for free transfers. Pay attention to the information displayed at the bottom of the interface under the recipient account. In the everPay application, assets deposited into everPay are initially stored in the user's Ethereum address, but in the transfer interface, users can directly transfer the balance from their Ethereum address to any other Ethereum address, or even an Arweave address (note that this is not a cross-chain transfer).

In all payments made through everPay, the entire operation only requires the original asset owner to sign through the wallet, without the need to pay any gas fees. More importantly, everPay supports seamless direct transfers between Ethereum addresses and Arweave addresses, eliminating cross-chain costs.

So, how does everPay achieve free on-chain payments?

According to its official introduction, everPay utilizes Arweave to store transaction records, supporting a million-level transaction scale with a storage cost of $1. In other words, the only cost of using everPay is the storage cost of storing the payment transaction record on the Arweave chain. This minimal storage cost on Arweave's optimized public chain platform allows everPay to waive this already minimal storage cost, offering users a genuinely free on-chain payment service.

Free stablecoin payments have always been a rigid demand within the crypto industry. With Tron starting to charge transaction fees for transfers, there has yet to be a good alternative solution in the market. The free payment application developed by everPay using Arweave's storage technology may be a direction worth paying attention to.

5. Acting as Middleware for Other Blockchains' Storage

Strictly speaking, these applications primarily utilize Arweave's storage functionality, making them somewhat off-topic in this article. However, as these applications consume a significant amount of Arweave's storage space, being the main contributors supporting the growth of Arweave's business data, they are briefly introduced in the final section of this article.

(1) Bundlr

A significant obstacle faced by new Web3 applications when using Arweave for storage is the issue of paying storage costs. It is hard to imagine an Ethereum application prompting users to install ArConnect wallets and purchase AR tokens to pay for storage costs.

In platforms like Mintbase on Near and the writing platform Mirror, while the storage costs are borne by the project silently, this commercial model is evidently not sustainable for future larger-scale usage demands.

Therefore, the entire crypto industry urgently needs a storage middleware that allows users of other public chain smart contracts to conveniently purchase Arweave storage services. This is where Bundlr, the first storage middleware product introduced, comes into play.

Bundlr, launched just last month, boasts a very simple homepage.

Bundlr's main business logic is quite straightforward. Firstly, users of other public chains can directly delegate storage tasks to Bundlr, pay storage costs in the native tokens of their respective public chains, and have Bundlr convert other public chain tokens into AR for paying the storage gas fees.

Additionally, Bundlr can bundle multiple storage transactions into one (referred to as a bundle) in the background and submit them to the main network. This significantly reduces the number of transactions on the Arweave main network, indirectly increasing the network's transaction throughput and reducing the gas costs for each storage transaction to some extent.

Currently, users on Polygon can already pay for storage costs on Arweave by directly paying with Matic to Bundlr and having Bundlr gradually support more public chains in the future.

In the Arweave browser, you can also see the increasing number of storage transactions conducted using Bundlr. In the transaction browsing interface below, transactions marked in purple symbols are storage transactions bundled using Bundlr's service.

Furthermore, Bundlr uses an economic mechanism to prevent malicious storage nodes. In the Bundlr system, centralized storage nodes are called Bundlers, and each node needs to stake project tokens $BNDL. If they fail to complete the user's storage instructions successfully, their staked tokens will be forfeited as a penalty.

(2) KYVE

KYVE is a storage middleware that utilizes Arweave's storage functionality to establish a bridge between Arweave and other public chains for storage. Unlike some projects that only use Arweave to back up user data in applications, KYVE directly backs up the entire history of public chains.

Currently, the storage of public chain historical states mainly relies on full nodes in the public chain network. However, operating a full node is costly and syncing historical data for new full nodes requires repeating all previous computation processes, making it time-consuming and resource-intensive. Additionally, retrieving historical blockchain data through a full node is relatively slow.

If all historical records of public chains can be directly stored on Arweave, leveraging Arweave's storage capabilities, it would significantly improve efficiency for new node syncing and historical data retrieval. The only challenge is ensuring that the historical data stored on Arweave cannot be tampered with.

KYVE's approach is to solve this critical issue by establishing an economic incentive mechanism. Currently, there are two types of nodes in the KYVE ecosystem: storage nodes and verification nodes. Storage nodes need to stake project tokens and submit the information to be stored to Arweave. Verification nodes are responsible for verifying the accuracy of the information. If a verification node detects malicious behavior by a storage node, the system will penalize them by confiscating their staked funds. Through this economic game mechanism, KYVE ensures the authenticity and validity of the blockchain information uploaded through its service.

Although KYVE is still in the testing network phase, it already supports data storage for multiple mainstream public chains like Solana, Cosmos, and Near. Following this trend, KYVE may soon evolve into a historical archive for the blockchain industry, leveraging Arweave's storage capabilities to store historical data generated by various other public chains. This solution to the insufficient number of full nodes in some public chains and the low efficiency of data retrieval may offer a significant improvement in the industry.

Key Pillars Behind the Development of the Arweave Ecosystem

Most of the applications introduced in this article rely on Arweave to provide support for smart contract functionalities at the underlying level. How a storage-focused public chain can support smart contracts has always been a key point that many find challenging to understand about the Arweave ecosystem. Towards the end of the article, we briefly address this issue.

Firstly, the most significant difference between Arweave, based on storage consensus, and other public chains is that it does not support on-chain computing functions, hence cannot achieve consensus on the computational results of smart contracts on-chain. But without supporting on-chain computing, how can the results of smart contracts be obtained?

To explain in relatively simple terms, since Arweave