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What is the Value of One AR?
AR is the token of Arweave, a permanent storage protocol that has gradually expanded into an ecosystem including temporary storage and the AO computing layer. AR has a fully circulating supply of 65.65 million tokens and is currently in a deflationary phase. In the past two months, with the launch of the AO testnet, daily consumption has reached around 2,000 tokens. As blockchain archival services flourish and the AO mainnet explodes in activity, daily consumption could reach 10,000 tokens. The Value of Permanent Storage The cost of data storage is decreasing by approximately 30% annually, making storage increasingly affordable. However, the permanence of data storage is an extremely valuable feature. Just as Bitcoin and Ethereum were designed for the permanent, tamper-proof storage of value, Arweave is designed for the permanent, tamper-proof storage of data. Both are sufficiently decentralized and valuable networks. Data is the oil of the 21st century. If we accept the hydrothermal origin hypothesis for oil, crude oil is almost infinitely abundant, and the same is true for data generation. However, just as the highly efficient and cost-effective oil refining industry is immensely valuable, the deep processing and refinement of data support NVIDIA's 4 trillion market value. Similarly, permanent data preservation is akin to strategic oil reserves. Data is generated infinitely, and valuable data can be efficiently and permanently stored. Arweave serves as the strategic reserve warehouse for the valuable data of various enterprises. The Meme of Permanent Storage and Transmission In 1976, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published his seminal work The Selfish Gene, where he coined the term “meme.” He defined a meme as the basic unit of cultural transmission, analogous to genes in biological evolution. Dawkins argued that, just as genes persist through replication and transmission in populations, memes spread and evolve in human culture through imitation. Half a century later, the hottest meme coin speculation platform, http://Pump.fun, recently completed its token public sale. Yesterday, I created a meme coin on the platform, and today, it has already “died” in its evolutionary journey. Meme coins are rapidly created, hyped, and die daily, with only the legendary revenue stories of the Pump platform continuing to spread. We are all victors in the process of human evolution, but for the vast majority of us, this victory is only at the DNA level. We cannot leave behind literary works like Shakespeare or theories like Einstein. A few generations later, no one will remember us buried beneath the earth—not even our genetic descendants. But Arweave changes this. My memories, life experiences, vivid slices of my life, thoughts, anxieties, and visions for the future can all be permanently encrypted and stored on Arweave. This allows future generations to see every aspect of their ancestors’ lives from centuries ago. This is the democratization of family memory preservation technology. In the past, only nobility had their stories written and passed down. Now, every one of us can record everything with a smartphone and preserve it permanently with ease. A private key passed down through generations can perpetuate cultural genes (memes) forever. The Unchanging Value of One BTC and One AR Opening my Google Photos, I found a picture from when I first paid attention to Bitcoin in August 2011. Bitcoin had just experienced a speculative bubble burst, with its price dropping from $30 to $1–2. Yes, you read right—compared to today’s price of over $100,000 per coin, it’s almost unimaginable. But Bitcoin remains the same Bitcoin. My understanding of it has never changed. Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper title already told everyone: Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, fully embodying Friedrich Hayek’s ideas in The Denationalization of Money. Back then, we couldn’t imagine Bitcoin becoming a national strategic reserve, but we did envision that all competitive major companies and super-individuals could issue their own sovereign credit currencies, rather than today’s dollar-backed stablecoins. At the time, I imagined Bitcoin would become the anchor of money. In the jungle of competing sovereign currencies, these currencies would need to be pegged to Bitcoin to enhance their credibility, much like gold’s role in backing national currencies. All these currency symbols would essentially represent the entirety of human wealth. Thus, the value of one BTC is 1/21 millionth of the anchor of human wealth. Bitcoin emerged in the context of the 2008 global financial crisis, when fiat currencies were overissued by sovereign nations to seize individual wealth. Bitcoin’s primary value lies in countering the constant devaluation of sovereign fiat currencies. Arweave, launched in 2018, emerged in a context where people could no longer tolerate their personal data being censored, deleted, or misused by centralized institutions. Arweave’s primary value lies in empowering individuals to resist the hegemony of centralized data collectors. Currently, AR is experiencing a crash similar to Bitcoin’s in 2011, but Arweave remains the ever-progressing Arweave. The value of AR remains unchanged; only speculative funds are shifting. My vision for Arweave is that it will become the storage lake for humanity’s valuable data. Encryption algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) will mine value from this data lake. When AR’s annual deflation reaches 5%, imagine a world where oil extraction equipment decreases by 5% annually—countries would start hedging risks, and strategic reserves would become a priority. Similarly, major companies with permanent, tamper-proof data storage needs will hoard AR to hedge against the risk of deflationary price increases. So, what is the value of one AR? It is 1/60 millionth of the permanent storage of data from the past, present, and future. With a future human population exceeding 10 billion, I only need less than one AR to seize this opportunity for permanent storage, allowing my family to leave a record in human civilization rather than being buried and forgotten in the dust. If the value of one BTC is 1/21 millionth of the anchor of human wealth, then the value of one AR is 1/60 millionth of the opportunity for permanent storage of human civilization. Don’t be foolish—the meme coin I bought today won’t spread forever. It will likely die and disappear tomorrow or next year. But to pass down our cultural genes—our memes—one AR is enough.
Arweave/AO is the next Bitcoin-level wealth opportunity.
The real successor of Satoshi Nakamoto's original intention of fair participation in mining is #Arweave. Currently, mining #AO is in a very early stage. It is also designed to be halved every 4 years, and all 21 million coins are distributed to miners. It is now in a similar situation to before Hanyez open-sourced his optimization algorithm for GPU mining. Big funds come in to mine $AO, which is similar to the competition between graphics cards and CPUs. Cherish the fact that you can now occupy a high share in the small computing power pool. The market basically does not know how strong the fundamentals of $AR are. It is an order of magnitude stronger than Ethereum and Solana. Arweave will be upgraded in February, and the cost of data permanence will drop significantly again, which can compete head-on with Google Photo's storage that requires continuous monthly payments. The growth of Arweave's stored data business is already very beautiful. Coupled with the business explosion of AO @aoTheComputer, Load network and other archiving services for all blockchain data, the data storage business will usher in an order of magnitude explosion. However, the market's perception of Arweave is still at the stage of storing small NFT pictures. The second is the innovation of positioning. Arweave is no longer a simple storage public chain, but the DA archive layer of the entire blockchain world + concurrent execution of high-performance public chain bottom layer. Not only has the data permanent storage business grown, but also opened up the Arfleet data fixed deposit business. $AR is a token that truly relies on business to achieve deflation. Eth, sol, dot, sui, which pledge mining is not self-mining, AR can mine AO by holding it. $AO (http://ao.arweave.dev) is a new absolutely fair launch token. 2/3 of AO tokens are allocated to stETH DAI and other tokens for staking mining, and 1/3 of AO tokens are distributed to $AR holders. $AR is not only deflationary, but also can mine a new token. After $AO opens trading on February 8, the yield apy of $AR holdings can be calculated. Third, the combination of Arwaeve and AO will bring a new computing paradigm to the entire blockchain. It is no longer a blockchain computing paradigm where multiple nodes synchronize a memory pool and a single thread fights for a CPU, but a computing model of concurrent execution and message communication. This will bring more flexibility to developers, especially in LLM large model deployment, front-end one-click decentralized deployment, GPU+TEE deterministic reasoning, full-chain game concurrent execution, etc., and of course, autonomous DeFi, Agent AI and other aspects of development, which will bring new technical support to developers. The outbreak of the AO ecosystem will increase the demand exposure for AR tokens by 1-3 orders of magnitude. At present, the demand for AR tokens is mainly for shareholding and data permanence payment. When the AO ecological application explodes, AR will be a shovel, an LP token, a trading pair, a pledged interest-bearing asset, and an LSD underlying asset.
The future of Arweave/AO and AI Agents
Information gaps allow arbitrage space to exist widely in the real world and on-chain world. As LLM AI gradually replaces search engines, arbitrage space created by junk products like Baidu that artificially create information gaps is gradually disappearing. If future economic activities are built on a large scale on the basis of Arweave+AO, and countless AI Agents run on AO, will information gaps still exist widely? In the end, arbitrage will no longer depend on the absolute information gap, but on whether or not you are willing to burn gas for the Agent, and AO's gas is approximately equal to Arweave's storage cost, which means that a large amount of arbitrage space in the future human society comes from the gap between AR price and storage cost. That is, the gradient difference of information entropy will be continuously smoothed out by Arweave's immutable storage and AI.
Why I am so optimistic about Arweave/AO
AO has a low market value, but it is not listed on many exchanges and has low visibility. Arweave has been running for almost 8 years and has entered the deflation stage. However, large-scale applications still need time. As more and more applications are added to AO, Arweave will be more widely used. For example, ArDriver can help families store photo albums and permanent memories. For example, ar.io can help many corporate websites and government websites archive. Many companies cannot make false propaganda at will, and the government cannot remove some materials at will. Let the Internet have memory. With AO, the entire Internet economy can actually be reshaped, including the music industry, subscription payment, blogs, forums, news media, AI push, game distribution, books, and even e-commerce. Arweave can cross cycles. The founder Sam is still young and enthusiastic. I have been in this blockchain industry for more than 12 years. How many people have laid down, how many people have left, and how many people have completely stopped doing things. Sam, who has been doing things with a small team, will sooner or later be recognized by the market as valuable. AO's hyperbeam beta version has been released. This is a transitional version, a transition from the laboratory to the production line. Anyway, I am one of the first users. It works, it is easy to use, and the delivery reaches the proportion of the hype. We all look at it objectively. For example, the last time the main network was launched, it was a pitfall for everyone. What a broken main network, it is actually a test network, which dampened everyone's enthusiasm, but in the long run, it is not a big deal. In the early days of Bitcoin, hundreds of millions of BTC were mined from one block, and Ethereum had an emergency hard fork in the early days, but it was not a big deal. This is a very awesome thing. Anyway, there are few people talking about it in the community, and 90% of people don't understand it. What can hyperbeam do? It can install light clients such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in it, which means that AO can directly interoperate with other chains, run GPUs, and large models LLM directly in it. Can other blockchains do AI on the chain? Only AO can do it. There are also TEE and GPU TEE, which are very good technologies. They don't need any coprocessors at all. For example, Phala, which is praised to the sky, I have sold all Pha anyway. There are two reasons for AO network cards. One is dryrun, which has been optimized now, and the other is that there is no gas, which is blocked by a large number of bots sending spam messages. This has also been optimized and the payment module has been added. You can look at the growth curve of Arweave's data storage. When AO runs, it will return to the high-speed rocket growth track. https://viewblock.io/arweave/stat/cumulativeWeaveSize Arweave nodes are profitable, and AO nodes should also make money. There are also many projects that deploy hyperbeam nodes together, and then add the delegate module, so that everyone can pledge and earn gas fees. Yes, Arweave was previously integrated for B-end users. Now with AO, C-end users can create data as much as much as they want. Arweave is a data lake, and it can store as much data as it wants. The biggest benefit of Arwaeve, which is actually completely unknown to everyone, is quantum computing. All blockchains need to upgrade PQC. The biggest feature of the anti-quantum algorithm is that the signature will expand 100 times, and the on-chain data will explode. In the end, only Arweave, the data lake, can help everyone archive. Because all public chains are still waiting for banks, governments, and large Internet companies to upgrade PQC first, because only when they are centralized can they prove that quantum computing is not virtual, because the cost of upgrading PQC is not low. For many public chains, the upgrade is very difficult. It is difficult to successfully upgrade the Bitcoin network because the Bitcoin network is too old and too conservative, and it is small block. But the big trend is that Arweave archives the entire blockchain network. Its business is not growing slowly, but will explode in the era of quantum computing, with an increase of 2 orders of magnitude.