Arweave is a storage network built on a decentralized network structure called “blockweave technology”. Arweave is not strictly a blockchain, but a graph structure that links each block to two prior blocks.
Arweave is developing an underlying network to host "the permaweb" — a permanent, decentralized web with a number of community-driven applications and platforms.
AR is Arweave's native utility token and has the following use cases:
Miner rewards: Miners in the network receive AR tokens for mining new blocks, which requires them to store and serve data. It is possible for a single wallet owner to be both a user and a miner.
Transaction fees: Users that wish to include a transaction in a block have to pay transactions fees denominated in AR tokens.
The protocol consists of the following major components:
Permaweb: A collection of interlinked documents and applications where all contents are permanent. Browsers will have access to all of the data stored in the network, because the Arweave network itself is built on top of HTTP.
Profit sharing communities: Arweave is developing an ecosystem to empower founders, contributors and users. Founders may connect with the Arweave community and issue Profit Sharing Tokens as a means to raise capital and engage with their community.
Content Moderation: Nodes are not forced to store any data. As such, storage is guaranteed only probabilistically and at the network level, allowing individual miners to implement content policies by selecting which blocks and transactions they wish to store.
As at May 14th 2021, the total supply of AR is 66,000,000 and the current circulating supply is 46,413,526 (~70.32%).