Arweave at a glance.
Arweave launched its mainnet in June 2018 as a Layer 1 built around a single idea: pay once, store data permanently, instead of paying rent to a cloud provider forever. Here is how it works and what it is used for, not the price.
n/a
Value locked in DeFi protocols on Arweave. Updated Sep 19, 2026. Source: DefiLlama.
AR
Used for fees and securing the network. See the live AR price.
How Arweave works.
Arweave uses a data structure it calls the blockweave, where each new block links both to the previous block and to a randomly selected earlier block in the chain's history. To mine a block, a miner has to prove it holds the data from that randomly chosen recall block, which means miners are economically rewarded for storing as much of Arweave's historical data as possible, rather than only recent blocks. Difficulty adjusts roughly every 10 blocks to target an average block time of about 2 minutes. This SPoRA design succeeded Arweave's original Proof of Access mechanism in a February 2021 network upgrade, which added a stronger incentive for miners to serve data quickly rather than just store it.
Arweave uses a data structure it calls the blockweave, where each new block links both to the previous block and to a randomly selected earlier block in the chain's history. To mine a block, a miner has to prove it holds the data from that randomly chosen recall block, which means miners are economically rewarded for storing as much of Arweave's historical data as possible, rather than only recent blocks. Difficulty adjusts roughly every 10 blocks to target an average block time of about 2 minutes. This SPoRA design succeeded Arweave's original Proof of Access mechanism in a February 2021 network upgrade, which added a stronger incentive for miners to serve data quickly rather than just store it.
Pay once, store forever
Uploading data to Arweave is a single transaction. Most of that fee goes into a storage endowment rather than being paid out immediately.
The storage endowment
The endowment holds the upfront payment and releases it to miners gradually over time, an economic model designed to fund storage long after the original payment was made.
Proof of Access mining
Miners must prove they hold a randomly selected historical block to produce a new one, which rewards storing more of the network’s data rather than just the newest blocks.
The permaweb
Applications and websites can be built directly on top of Arweave’s permanent storage layer, an ecosystem commonly referred to as the permaweb.
What Arweave is used for.
Arweave’s ecosystem centers on permanent storage for data, applications and NFTs, along with AO, a compute layer built on top of Arweave’s storage.
Permanent data storage
Files, app data, and archives can be stored on Arweave with a single payment, rather than an ongoing cloud storage subscription.
The permaweb
Developers build permanently-hosted websites and applications directly on Arweave’s storage layer.
NFT and media storage
NFT metadata and media are commonly stored on Arweave so they cannot disappear if a centralized host goes offline.
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