Arweave - decentralized permanent storage

Why use Arweave?

As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it.

The decentralized, permanent, distributed ledger based nature of Arweave makes it superb for permanent storage, because it will always remember all files published on to the network, where as ipfs might forget.

What is Arweave?

Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever – for the very first time.

Basically it’s decentralized and actual permanent storage. For more feel free to read the explaination from ArDrive here or the Arweave Lightpaper here

How to use Arweave?

Uploads to Arweave can be done using ArDrive link

There is also the arkb upload tool from the Arweave team, which is documented here

To retrieve from arweave you can try the following:

https://arweave.net/<id>

so for example to get the image of a bored ape NFT:

https://arweave.net/ZQY3ditXQtI10IPb-cMYWrBkD-oIGIif_2uHgLS5UYE

In Smart Contracts we typically use ar:// instead of specifying the gateway. So that Bored Ape link would be:

ar://ZQY3ditXQtI10IPb-cMYWrBkD-oIGIif_2uHgLS5UYE

That way the one consuming our link can decide which gateway to use and the link still works even if the arweave.net domain/gateway may become obsolete.