GM!
Last week Arweave turned 7, and this week we'll take a look at some of the milestones, announcements related to AO, Arweave Day Berlin, and more.
Let's get into it.
Arweave Day 2025 📆
June 8th, 2025, marked the 7th year of Arweave providing long-term, immutable, and decentralized data storage to the world. This marks an important day to remember the problems Arweave solves right now, how Arweave looks with AO mainnet, and where it's headed.
The history of Arweave 💾
The modern web, although bringing a new era of communication, also came with new problems. Link rot for one, where posts online are lost or removed and are no longer accessible.
This is just one of the problems Arweave solves, among many others. It creates a system where people can store their images, videos, stories, for centuries to come.
Teams like ArDrive built on this to provide a cloud storage like solution, but without vendor lock-in and with the benefits of Arweave. This eventually expanded into AR.IO, a gateway network which indexes and serves data stored on Arweave to the general public.
Organizations building on Arweave also realized that data isn't limited to just images or text - but also could be used to represent programs. A system called SmartWeave emerged, which had lazy evaluation on user devices. This marked the precursor to AO, where this idea was formalized and evolved into the idea of a decentralized compute network.
The launch of AO Computer 💻
With AO, came a new way to think about accessing and storing data on Arweave.
What if the data could be used to represent state, and a compute network could ingest this state and run smart contracts?
AO builds precisely on this question, but thanks to the unique nature of Arweave provides something else - complete, scalable parallel execution. Arweave is leveraged for state consensus, while AO nodes are focused on computation and results.
AO's mainnet launched in February of this year and has since seen a multitude of apps built out, including decentralized exchanges, marketplaces, stablecoins, and more.
AO's node software, HyperBEAM, has been continually upgraded over the last few months, with Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, even dropping a new release on June 8th, which was Arweave's birthday.
Arweave Day Berlin 🇩🇪
Over the weekend, Arweave Day Berlin took place to mark Arweave Day 2025. Teams from all over the ecosystem attended to meet up, give talks, and hack on all things AO and Arweave.
Not much information on the event is public yet, so we're waiting to see what exciting new announcements are in the works. In the meantime, the latest update to HyperBEAM brings about the question: what could AO be heading towards in the future?
The latest release introduced beta testing for "a confidential, trust minimized execution environment", which makes use of AMD TEEs. This could bring about a lot of interesting projects to AO in the future through the use of collectively controlled private keys, and also allows nodes to "prove" they are running inside of a TEE using cryptographic attestations.
With these developments alongside the community building from Berlin, it's shaping up to be an exciting time in the Arweave ecosystem.
ICYMI 👀
- Vela Ventures Hacker House takes place
- StarGrid hits 5,000 players
- Load Network launches Atomic Asset collection
- Bazar gets new developer resources
This Week's Featured Community Piece 📝
For protocol developers or those interested in the tech behind Arweave and AO, @K4y1s shared "theBeamBook".
This explores the Erlang runtime system and virtual machine that Arweave is built upon, and which inspired the architecture of AO. You can learn more here.
Thanks for reading!
If you know anyone else who would find this information and our insights helpful, please share this newsletter with them.
Follow us on X to stay up-to-date. Pro tip: check out @aoComputerClub.
The Longview Team
This is not investment advice. No profit guarantees. If in the U.S., ensure compliance with U.S. laws and seek professional advice.