Arweave is a decentralized storage blockchain protocol designed to keep data permanently over the long term. It was founded by Sam Williams and William Jones and began under the name Archain.
Its mainnet launched in 2018, and its native token is AR. The project promotes a 'Pay Once, Store Forever' model, where a single upfront fee covers ongoing storage.
Arweave uses a structure called the blockweave and a Proof of Access style consensus that checks whether miners actually store past data. Later upgrades such as SPoRA also reward miners for being able to retrieve data quickly.
Part of each storage fee goes into an endowment meant to fund long-term storage costs. This design relies on the assumption that the cost of storage keeps falling over time.
Data provided by CoinGecko
AR has a maximum supply of about 66 million tokens, and most of it is already in circulation. The token is used to pay storage fees and to reward miners.
Arweave hosts the permaweb, an ecosystem of permanent websites and apps. In February 2025, AO, a parallel computing network that uses Arweave as its data layer, launched its mainnet.
Long-lived, censorship-resistant storage is useful for archives, NFT metadata, and preserving public records. Users also avoid recurring monthly storage fees.
However, the permanent storage model depends on long-term cost declines, and the model could face strain if that assumption fails. Data that is hard to delete can raise issues around illegal content and privacy, and competition from other storage projects and price volatility are also worth noting.
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