Overview of the Arweave Ecosystem Infrastructure in 2023
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Overview of the Arweave Ecosystem Infrastructure in 2023
Arweave's composability and developer momentum together have driven the growth of ecosystem infrastructure.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Translation: Jomosis @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Infrastructure and tools serve as the foundation for growth within blockchain ecosystems, much like a building's base. The robust characteristics and diverse use cases of blockchain technology attract developers to build tools, unlocking potential for application development. This holds true for the Arweave blockchain.
Since the beginning of 2023, Arweave has grown from 25 projects in 2022 to 33 infrastructure and tooling protocols. Over the past year, multiple partnerships have formed both within and outside the ecosystem; projects have addressed vulnerabilities and announced new features. Arweave’s composability and strong developer momentum have jointly driven the expansion of its infrastructure ecosystem.
4EVERLAND
In the first quarter of this year, 4EVERLAND partnered with Livepeer, a video transcoding platform. 4EVERLAND, a project offering data storage and hosting services on Arweave and other storage networks, provided a caching layer for Livepeer’s video services on Arweave. It also collaborated with partners such as WeaveDB, demonstrating how both projects meet blogging publication needs. Although 4EVERLAND utilizes other storage platforms beyond Arweave, it announced in October that it had uploaded 60 million files—proving Arweave is its primary storage solution.
Ar.io
If you were to ask what Ar.io Network's greatest achievement in 2023 was, the answer would be opening up the technology behind Arweave access points. Mid-year, Ar.io open-sourced the code for creating Arweave gateways. According to Ar.io, their goal is to eliminate single points of failure and build a highly resilient network. Within two months, the number of Arweave gateways increased to over 200. Ar.io then developed Wayfinder, a tool to locate these gateways by creating a gateway registry and showcasing GAR functionality. Wayfinder is a Chrome extension that directs users to the optimal gateway.
Irys
Judging by user and transaction data, Irys can undoubtedly be called the most successful project in the Arweave ecosystem. In 2023, Irys (formerly Bundlr) evolved from a project extending Arweave into launching Provenance—a system designed to create permanent, unrestricted, and precise data records. Notable projects outside the Arweave ecosystem, including Solana Mobile and Immutable, have partnered with Irys to leverage Provenance’s capabilities. On scalability, in January, Irys demonstrated its legitimacy in scaling Arweave by testing at a rate of 50,000 transactions per second—and successfully completed the challenge. This concrete proof effectively convinced the Lens Protocol team to adopt Irys and Arweave for building Momoka’s data availability (DA) layer. Irys guarantees successful data uploads onto Arweave’s permanent and cost-efficient storage network.
Dojima
Based on Dojima Network’s activities this year, it has been actively promoting its products, with students from Indian universities being one of its key target groups.
The company also launched a blockchain explorer and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings, providing users with on-chain utilities such as transaction fee calculation and transaction signing.
Dojima Network is a decentralized cross-chain Layer 1 platform that acts as an intermediary layer connecting all major blockchains—bridging L1 and L2 applications—to address pressing issues within the ecosystem.
FirstBatch
FirstBatch is a project building collaborative, human-centric tools aimed at serving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Early in 2023, it released a statement explaining why it chose to participate in Arweave, citing Arweave’s ability to overcome bottlenecks and limitations in its EVM environment. Throughout the year, FirstBatch remained focused on tool development. In Q1, it launched HollowDB—a tool built atop Arweave that uses zero-knowledge proofs to control data operations, enabling complex objects to be stored as key-value pairs on-chain. Also in Q1, it developed Gravitate, which combines GPT-4 summarization with hyper-personalized identity marketing to transform user reading experiences on social media and content platforms. In Q2, FirstBatch leveraged Arweave and Warp contracts to build DANNY, a decentralized vector database for transparent AI applications. According to FirstBatch founder Ömer Kaya, the synergy between DANNY and Gravitate demonstrates their combined power. The project also introduced FirstBatch ID, giving users personalized experiences across content platforms, and developed User Embeddings—a tool mapping user thoughts into personal AI memory. By empowering developers to build personalized LLM applications and continuously increasing engagement among generative AI users, FirstBatch is a project to watch in AI and Web3 in 2024.
Kwil
Much of Kwil’s activity this year centered around building a stronger relational database framework.
Within a month, it launched its second version—Alpha. Alpha is an SDK enabling users to build decentralized relational databases, along with Kwil CLI, a tool for interacting with those databases. Even Darwin, CTO of Decent Land Labs, noted that Kwil offers “excellent documentation, tools, and a seamless experience.” Kwil hosted several major events this year, including the launch of Kuneiform, a tool allowing backend deployment of dApps in under 100 lines of code, and an improved SDK based on user feedback.
Kwil also expanded its SQL syntax to help developers build more complex applications. What’s a database without a resource explorer? In June, Kwil introduced a resource browser, further strengthening its database infrastructure.
Later, it rolled out extension tools allowing developers to connect to blockchains and execute logic. By year-end, Kwil achieved network decentralization, enabling anyone to build and deploy decentralized relational databases.
KYVE
For KYVE Network, 2023 was undoubtedly a year of achievement: it was nominated for Startup of the Year and successfully launched its mainnet—an ambitious goal achieved after two years of steady effort.
This year, KYVE established a foundation to support the project’s development, adoption, and growth. The mainnet launched in March. By July, it had recorded 1 million transactions, totaling 10 million to date. KYVE reported overwhelmingly positive community response, with all 100 validator slots filled within hours. The mainnet software underwent four updates throughout 2023.
KYVE Academy was also launched, helping users expand their Web3 knowledge. Within two months, it attracted over 3,300 users. New official data pools were added this year, including Cosmos Hub, Osmosis Zone, Archway, and Axelar. Additionally, after receiving governance approval to open pool funds to a broader audience, KYVE restructured its operations—taking a step toward becoming a fully decentralized network.
If KYVE is a project you admire and you’re curious about how the team built it, consider the words of KYVE founder Fabian Riewe when he marked 10 million transactions in November: KYVE built effective solutions because it deeply understood the pain points of partner chains.
Livepeer
Livepeer is one of the pioneers using Arweave infrastructure for video services, storing data via Irys (formerly Bundlr) on the Arweave protocol. At the start of the year, the project released APIs and SDKs, expanding support for additional file formats and larger file sizes. It enhanced its video infrastructure software, enabling developers to build short-video applications for social platforms (imagine a Web3 version of TikTok), and introduced token-based thresholds for video uploads. In August alone, it delivered over 11 million minutes of exclusive video streams. In October, following governance approval for changes to its funding model, it upgraded its software. By year-end, Livepeer launched Studio CLI, enabling developers to obtain Livepeer Studio API keys and spin up ultra-low-latency video applications in seconds.
The Livepeer Delta protocol, rooted in the concept of a public goods treasury, carries hopes for decentralized growth of the future Livepeer ecosystem. Rumors suggest Livepeer users can expect AI-related product developments from the project.
Streamr
Streamr is a peer-to-peer network project for real-time publishing and subscribing to data. To solidify its position in the Arweave ecosystem, it announced collaborations with Usher Labs, KYVE, and the Arweave Protocol to launch the LogStore Network. LogStore combines Streamr’s ease of data transmission, KYVE’s consensus-driven data validity, and Arweave’s permanence and immutability. Deeper integration between LogStore Network and other projects in the Arweave ecosystem is expected in 2024.
Meson Network
According to its roadmap released at the start of the year, Meson Network planned to focus on developing GaganNode—a next-generation decentralized residential IP and bandwidth marketplace aiming to alleviate global IPv4 address shortages through Web3 technology. On the innovation front, the decentralized bandwidth marketplace launched GatewayX early in 2023 to solve origin unavailability issues for storage and media websites. In May, it released GagaNode Pro, followed by Ipcola as a solution for connection barriers. Meson introduced the Vector Program this year, planning to build a Nasdaq-like bandwidth market potentially implemented in 2024.
Molecular Execution Machine
The Molecular Execution Machine (MEM) is Decent Land Labs’ entry into the Arweave ecosystem’s tooling space following a strategic pivot. Officially, its mission is to break down barriers between chains and protocols. Launched mid-2023, MEM serves as infrastructure supporting other Decent Land protocols such as NameSpace, Ark Protocol, and Arweave Name Service. Beyond Decent Land, its technology also powers everPay and Kwil. It stands as a critical development tool because developers can write smart contracts in multiple programming languages using MEM. As part of its decentralization plan, MEM stated it is migrating some core infrastructure components to Akash.
RedStone
Throughout the year, numerous projects across the Web3 ecosystem partnered with RedStone to use its customizable oracle solutions: RedStone Core, RedStone Classic, and RedStoneX. RedStone did not release any software upgrades this year, indicating it is already a mature, operational project now focusing on expanding adoption of its oracle data services. However, the story differs for its sister project, Warp Contracts—the most widely adopted method for implementing smart contracts in the Arweave ecosystem, used by dozens of major projects. At the start of the year, it launched Warp Contracts CLI, Warp Templates, and Warp D.R.E., offering developers various functionalities. SonAR, Warp Key Value Storage, and Warp Nested Bundle were released in February. In March, it introduced a Contract Constructor. Its SDK upgrade marked a significant milestone, elevating the platform’s capabilities. Warp Contracts averaged one feature or infrastructure release per month in 2023. Projects like Warp Contracts have massive ecosystem impact: in February, it announced one million deployed smart contracts; by May, that number had grown to five million.
Spheron
For Spheron, co-founder Prashant Maurya declared early in the year that the project was the first to bring Arweave into ecosystems beyond its native environment. In April, Spheron—a platform offering deployment and scaling services for applications—launched NftyNFT to simplify NFT storage. It later released its Compute SDK.
The Graph Protocol
In March 2023, The Graph Protocol and The Graph Network separately received 37 billion queries—compared to ChatGPT’s 300 million monthly queries, according to Tegan Kline, one of the protocol’s founders. The Graph Protocol unveiled a three-phase roadmap: Sunray, Sunbeam, and Sunrise. The project stated it will further support decentralized data and enable smooth upgrades across all supported chains—including Arweave and 42 others—on The Graph Network.
WeaveDB
WeaveDB, the distributed NoSQL database backed by $900,000 in funding and a newly appointed CEO, was highly active in 2023. It ran promotional campaigns and launched a “Hosted Node Service” exclusively for Developer DAO members, solving the problem of requiring node ownership to interact with WeaveDB. The project optimized its system to achieve write query speeds of 30 to 50 milliseconds. It also launched Jots, a decentralized social network. By year-end, WeaveDB announced modular structuring of its architecture, claiming this design will support different types of databases—from the same Arweave data source—such as relational databases.
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