New branches on old trees: Arweave’s new narrative and potential benefits

Author: Humble Farmer Army, crypto researcher; Translation: 0xxz@Golden Finance

A token that combines AI, parallel computing and decentralized storage? And all tokens are fully circulated?

Yes, you heard it right...

AR is a good example of a new life for an old tree.

Arweave History

Arweave was founded in 2017 and has spent most of its life as a decentralized storage provider.  Arweave 's vision is similar to Filecoin , aiming to replace centralized storage providers by permanently storing files through a distributed network of computers.

This storage product has been a success for all customers, with the network growing steadily over time:

In fact, in the collaboration between Solana and Arweave, Arweave effectively acts as a storage backup for all Solana states, or “a decentralized permanent data storage solution for ledger data, ensuring that data can always be retrieved as needed.”

Decentralized storage protocols are also considered an important component of cryptocurrency x AI. With the advent of AI comes the need for data sovereignty, data provenance, and increased storage requirements, which we discussed in detail in our recent Filecoin report.

While the AI ​​narrative is interesting and certainly supports the AR token from a price perspective, we believe the latest AO computer development is more impactful....

Arweave New Narrative AO

On February 13, the Arweave team announced the AO "super parallel computer".

The AO computer is a parallel system designed to combine the trust-minimized advantages of Web 3 with the scalability and speed of traditional Web 2 computing environments.

AO should provide an experience similar to what Solana and MOVE-based public chains claim to provide...

Some commentators have suggested that the architecture will provide better results than existing Web 3 architectures such as Solana/Move, and will be very similar to Web 2 systems.  

AO Working Principle Architecture:

Another advantage of AO is the ability to read/write data from Arweave. The combination of built-in storage and next-generation parallel computing may bring some very interesting potential use cases.

New Use Cases for AO

We have already seen autonomous robots on the testnet:

The AO architecture is designed to support autonomous agent use cases, ranging from tokenized games to AI chatbots as seen in the testnet examples. Machine learning and large-scale deployment of AI models could be another potential use case.

Testnet data continues to pour in, and teams based on AO continue to emerge, for example, Liteseed is building faster and better ways to upload data.

It’s still early days for AO, but the potential is huge, which from a market perspective allows AR to start to be repriced from a middleware/storage provider to a full-fledged L1 ecosystem token.

Given that Filecoin has the Filecoin VM, the launch of AO puts AR in a similar position to FIL in terms of executing the product. Although Filecoin is far ahead in storage metrics, this could still put pressure on valuation differences.

The growth of the underlying storage network, the AI ​​narrative, and the launch of AO are all very compelling fundamental reasons to consider AR.

Potential Bullish Factors for AR

Beyond these more fundamental drivers, there are a few other supporting factors that could make AR an attractive token.

The AR supply is fully liquid, meaning all team and investor tokens are liquid, so there is no need to worry about unlocking issues or significant oversupply.

After speaking with funds in the industry, it is clear that there is not a large supply of this token (i.e. no sellers), and many large OTC desks either do not trade it or do not have any tokens to sell.

We are already seeing significant progress in the AR space, and this trend could continue if more funds become interested in this story.

Another potential catalyst for this is a Coinbase listing, as AR is not yet traded on Coinbase, nor is it a supported asset for Coinbase Custody…

Finally, with the launch of AO, many who have been following Arweave will recognize that the team is taking a different approach to marketing, both with branding and high-quality marketing videos.

The Arweave team now “gets it” from a narrative perspective, which is a huge pivot.