Building the Permaweb Backbone
As an ARCA founding member, enterprise architect and crypto miner, one of my goals when joining ARCA was to help build the infrastructure to support the next generation of decentralized, permanent Arweave applications. While the security of the Arweave network has never been better, certain capabilities have not been embraced by the network and community.
With this, I am pleased to announce the ARCA Arweave IPFS and Gateway platform and service —
We see this as benefiting the broader community in several ways.
- Further decentralizing Arweave by providing another public Gateway to use other than arweave.net.
- Support internal ARCA development needs, like for PermaSnap or Mobile Wallet development.
- Give the Mining community another public endpoint to connect as a trusted peer.
An Arweave Gateway node is similar to any other node, with additional features integrated for accessing or querying the network, including:
ArQL — a query language and index for querying blockweave metadata, focusing on transactions, their tags, and transaction-linked timestamps (see section below for further details).
Arweave DNS and TLS — a way to access applications stored on the blockweave using relevant wallet and transaction IDs as domain names. This feature is compatible with existing DNS and TLS systems.
These features are crucial to any decentralized application seeking to be adopted, whether ARCA sponsored or not. Even though this is starting off as an experiment, we expect to scale the service with demand. As new features are added onto the network, ARCA can use this new platform to continually test and provide early adopter feedback to the core Arweave team. Also as the content matures on the network, we expect to author a Democratic Content Policy to ensure only appropriate data is available for use.
I invite everyone to point their miners, front ends, back ends, serverless functions and anything in-between to use https://perma.online as their reference point for the Arweave network. Please reach out to ARCA if you have any questions or suggestions — we can be found on Twitter or the Arweave Developer Discord.
