Permaweb: A vision for a better Internet

Author: Orange, Source: PermaDAO

Today, I'm going to talk about Permaweb, or rather, a vision of a better internet.

I'm Tom, founder in residence of Forward Research and lead developer of the Stamp Protocol and Universal Content Marketplace. I'm proud to say I'm a pioneer at Permaweb. If you haven't heard of the Permaweb Pioneers podcast, you should definitely check it out.

So, what's in our talk? As a builder, creator, and user of Arweave, you should understand what Permaweb is and how it will change cyberspace. We'll talk about Permaweb and, more precisely, the values that drive Permaweb. Why is it different from the regular internet or traditional networks? That's what I'm trying to say.

So we've looked at the basic stack of the related Arweave network, and then we have Permaweb services, which include gateways, indexers, and bundled services. These services are actually a bridge to connect persistent data to applications that anyone with a web browser can use and interact with. Users connect using Permaweb applications, which are then served through gateways very similar to web servers, but directly to Permaweb or Arweave. Bundled services can be interpreted as optimizing the permissions of data to enter the Arweave network, while indexing services are a simple way to interpret that they are optimizing data read from the Arweave network.

Thus, Permaweb services provide the application speed needed to serve user data, but another interesting side effect is that it creates a composable internet where one application doesn't own your data, but users can transfer data between applications in a composable way.

That said, Permaweb's core values are useful, right? Anything on Permaweb needs to be useful, so I think it's very clear and extensible. Obviously, we need scalability for data and applications, and finally, perhaps the hardest thing is integrity, because unlike traditional networks, where applications on traditional networks may work today but may not work tomorrow, we need to build applications that will work today and in the next 200 years. So we really want to focus our mindset as builders on building complete applications that work now and in the future.

So one of the next things to do during our construction process is: how do we describe the state of the project while we are doing this construction work? Because when you have an idea, it doesn't fully mature overnight and be able to be built and used for 200 years. You have an idea; People comment on the idea, and what we want to do is implement the idea in a way that gets people to react, see what the ideas are, and really figure out if they're good or bad, which we call preview.

Preview is where we are when we come up with an idea, implement it and share it with the community and get feedback to really refine the project. The second state is Early Days, which you'll see a lot of in some Permaweb apps today, because during this Preview phase, we've implemented it and are getting feedback, and now we've refined it and think we can really turn it into a product. As a result, an early state that communicates this agreement, product, or service achieves "functional completion," but there may still be bug fixes and performance improvements. Feel free to use it, you will be very confident that it will always work, but there may be some bugs.

Then finally, Done. When we label a project, an agreement, or an application as "done," it means that we expect it to work with zero continuous development for at least the next 200 years, and hopefully forever. So when we mark an agreement as complete, we are saying that it is permanent, like permanent storage.

There are also some standards for Permaweb. The criteria we use are very straightforward. It must be on-chain; It must have decentralized access. So, anyone should be able to access it using any operational service, be it gateways, nodes, etc. Therefore, it is important that all content on Permaweb is accessible in a decentralized environment. Finally, one of the trickiest issues is verifiable computing, which basically means that when you compute the business logic of your application, you should get the same result whether you're using a MacBook or a Windows computer. Therefore, verifiable calculations mean that no matter where you are, you should get the same results if you look at the same data. That's the mindset we've taken when building these applications: to have these standard milestones.

These are Permaweb's general values and standards. We work within the Arweave ecosystem, and the Arweave ecosystem has grown significantly. This is a slide put together by the community lab, and you can see that there are tons of applications in the Arweave community. What about the Permaweb ecosystem? The Permaweb ecosystem focuses on useful, extensible, and complete protocols and applications. We break these down into very specific components

First, we start with protocols, which are defined by specifications. The easiest way is to explain the protocol I'm working on, called the "stamp protocol", which is a generic "like" button. The reason we emphasized the protocol was that we wanted a composable network where applications could be built and features could be added without the need for redesign. For example, the stamp protocol. If the user is on BazAR and they tagged the atomic asset, then go to the now.arweave.dev to view it. They will see that the asset has been tagged, which means that data is being transferred from one application to another.

Protocols are important, but developers love software development kits (SDKs) because it makes it easier for them to put applications together without essentially writing redundant code. Therefore, we put the SDKs on the blockchain. One of the founders of Permafacts is working on a project called Pakajs, which actually allows us to put SDKs on the Arweave blockchain so developers can access them forever.

Obviously, applications drive the development of Permaweb because users love applications to work with their data. The last two parts of the ecosystem are services, which include Warp, SmartWeave, and SCP, and tokens, which are used to transfer value from data between tokens and wallets. So all of these parts are very important when you think about Permaweb and how to build your application. As we build these building blocks, builders will be able to create applications faster than ever before. I'm totally convinced of this because we're dealing with data shared across applications, and we're really concerned about protocol integrity and composability.

So, instead of going through a bunch of screenshots, I would like to invite you to scan the QR code below. This QR code will take you to BazAR, our latest release that shows how the Permaweb app uses protocols, SDKs, services, and tokens to combine and share data, and allows creators to distribute their content and allow users to trade content on Permaweb.

When you look at BazAR, I'll quickly explain how it's built. Permaweb, we've seen slides before. You have these services, and the QR code you click will go to a gateway called arweave.asia. By the end of the year, we will have a lot of gateways that truly enable the decentralized entrance to Permaweb. Arweave Asia is based in Singapore and it uses our Arweave Lightnode, which is really cool.

When we got into BazAR, we had some tokens and some services that were actually the basis of BazAR. We have the U token, which represents the unit of account on Arweave, which I like to think of as Permaweb's medium of exchange. It's very easy to get it because when you deploy or publish data on Arweave, it actually mints some new tokens for you. And you can also go to getu to trade AR tokens to get U tokens, and finally, you can go to Permaswap to exchange many different tokens for U tokens, which will become Permaweb's currency so that you can buy or sell digital assets.

The second thing we have is the Universal Data License, which gives creators the right to specify the right to sell or distribute their assets. If they want to sell an incredible PFP for 1,000 coins, they can specify this when publishing the data, and this will belong to their own chain forever. The terms and conditions for the use of this data are very clear and descriptive.

Then the second Smartweave contract is the Universal Content Marketplace. This is an open contract that allows us to build BazAR on top of it, but other Permaweb applications can also use this contract to build different types of marketplaces. So we don't need a Permaweb marketplace, we need 100 Permaweb's marketplaces, but there is a contract that allows this kind of transaction to happen, making it easy for developers to implement a great user experience while still having the basic principles of the trading process.

Finally, in the lower right corner is the Pixel Token, a reward token in BazAR and UCM that allows users to receive a guarantee when purchasing assets. We have a feature called streaks, and they buy every day and get Pixel rewards, which can be traded by you and other means. They can actually be traded on BazAR itself, so you can actually sell your Pixel tokens on BazAR, get more and buy more digital assets.

Another important part I mentioned earlier related to Permaweb and BazAR components is the protocol. The two protocols I want to highlight are the Comment Protocol and the Collection Protocol. Any application can take advantage of these protocols, and we're publishing them on specs.arweave.dev, encouraging all developers to review and actually publish the open protocols for Permaweb so that other developers and future developers can take advantage of the system and build this incredible new network together.

Finally, there are more applications than just BazAR. ArDrive was one of the first Permaweb applications. We have fair agreements, which is a very cool and fascinating market for AI and LLM. Finally, one of the coolest things for the developers of Arweave right now is that if you want to stay up to date with what's going on every day, you can go to Now and check out everything that's posted on Permaweb.

Thank you very much, and that's it for my talk. Let's build a better Internet together!