Arweave: The Permanent Web Blockchain Explained

When you think of the internet, you assume your photos, videos, and posts will stick around. But most online content disappears—deleted, censored, or lost when a server shuts down. Arweave, a blockchain designed to store data permanently with a one-time payment. Also known as the permaweb, it’s not just another crypto project—it’s a bet that information should last as long as the internet itself. Unlike Ethereum or Bitcoin, which focus on transactions, Arweave is built for storage. You pay once, and your file—whether it’s a website, a tweet, or a medical record—is kept alive by miners who are rewarded with AR tokens. This isn’t cloud storage with a blockchain label. It’s a decentralized, tamper-proof archive that doesn’t rely on companies like Google or Amazon to stay online.

Arweave’s model is simple: miners get paid in AR tokens to store data forever. The network uses a clever trick called proof of access, a consensus mechanism that rewards miners for randomly retrieving old data chunks, proving they still have them. If they fail to retrieve it, they lose rewards. This keeps the network honest. The Arweave token (AR), the native currency used to pay for storage and reward miners isn’t traded just for speculation—it’s the fuel that keeps the whole system running. You can’t use Arweave without AR. And because storage costs are locked in at the time of upload, you’re not at the mercy of rising cloud fees later.

Arweave isn’t just theory. It’s already hosting websites, NFT metadata, historical records, and even parts of the Internet Archive. Projects like Mirror, ArDrive, and Arweave-based dApps rely on it because they need data that won’t vanish. But not every project using Arweave is trustworthy. Some tokens pretend to be built on it, but have no real storage function. Others promise free storage and vanish overnight. That’s why you’ll find real reviews below—no hype, just facts on what’s working, what’s risky, and what’s outright fake. Whether you’re a developer looking to build on a permanent web, a collector storing NFTs, or just someone tired of losing digital memories, Arweave offers something rare: true permanence. Below, you’ll see how people are using it, what’s gone wrong, and how to avoid the traps in a space full of copycats.