Michal Kaliszewski

This paper is intended to be everything you might ever need to know about Arweave in 14 pages. It has been years in the making. It is not like a traditional blockchain 'whitepaper'. It doesn't describe a system that might exist in the future, but offers a precise guide to a fully-functional and operational system as it exists today. Instead of being designed to get you excited about a future that may or may not happen, it is designed to help every Arweaver audit and understand the protocol for themselves. It is even complete with direct references to the code so that you can literally read the network's codebase alongside the paper, in order to gain your own confidence about how the network works and the guarantees it provides to you when you use it. We see this as an important milestone in the maturation of the network. Aside for the 2022 'towards' fair forks paper, all of the prior Arweave(/Archain) papers were released as drafts while the design of the system was still in flux. Many Arweavers have already given their feedback on this new paper -- for which we are immensely grateful. My expectation is that the version in the tweet above will be the final draft (17 😅), and the next version will be the definitive Arweave paper. Shoot me a DM with any final feedback on the above draft we will drop you some of the commemorative tokens in the final version of the paper when it is uploaded to Arweave! Merry Christmas, Arweavers 🫡.