Arweave Soars, Leads Market Rally Following Testnet Release

If you thought Bitcoin was having a good 24 hours, let me introduce you to Arweave (AR). The storage network has rocketed a wild 51% over the last day, capping off a week where the coin has doubled in price. It is now sitting at just under USD $30 (AUD $46.2) after launching at less than a dollar in 2020.

What’s Leading the Arweave Surge?

The overall crypto market has had an enjoyable week-to-date, but very few have performed as impressively as Arweave. After kicking things off as a decentralised storage network, the team has pivoted to focus on becoming a Web3 social media network, using AR tokens as the basis of content creation and ownership. 

To realise this vision, the team worked together to create an extremely scalable network capable of supporting significant traffic. The new protocol, named Arweave AO, was built atop the main Arweave network as a substantial improvement to data processing. Simply, Arweave is used for storage and development tools, while the L2 works with smart contracts and interoperability. The core idea – like most L2s – is to split the main tasks of a blockchain into separate layers, vastly improving efficiency. 

The Arweave AO chain had been working internally for a while, but the team has now officially released a Testnet for the much-anticipated network. And the results have been impressive, to say the least. 

According to developer Sam Williams, Arweave out TPS’ every other permissionless blockchain – even heavy-hitters like Solana and Polygon. Essentially, this means it can handle more traffic and data than 99% of networks in the cryptosphere. Investors have leaped at the news, causing a huge surge in price and network activity.

It’s worth noting that the Testnet is still a ways off becoming live, which could introduce new difficulties for the team to overcome. However, as it stands, the Arweave AO network is contending to become the most scalable blockchain in the world.