Decentralizing Data Storage With ArDrive’s Phil Mataras
We chat with Ar.IO’s CEO Phil Mataras about what blockchain can do for online storage solutions.
Farah Ibrahim, social media manager and content editor
Imagine that you uploaded a photo album of a family vacation onto an online storage drive today, and 200 years later your great great grandchild was still able to access it. Now imagine if the same was possible for your important documents or any other data that you need to be stored securely and permanently.
This is exactly what ArDrive does– permanent storage solutions that promise to keep your important files on a blockchain forever, and part of that promise means no monthly subscriptions. When you sign up for an ArDrive account, you only pay once to get lifetime access.
Using blockchain, Ar.IO wants to enable everyday users to store their information on their permaweb technology securely in order to keep their data for hundreds of years on a decentralized platform. We talked to Philip Mataras, the founder of Ar.IO, about why this technology is so integral and what the future holds for the blockchain-based startup. Here’s what he had to say:
How would you explain what ArDrive does to my grandma?
ArDrive is an app on your computer and phone that lets you permanently store your most important files and photos forever on a blockchain without any monthly subscriptions.
Ar.IO is what ArDrive (and many other apps) use to read and write data to this special blockchain, Arweave, which forms a new area of the internet we call the permaweb. Unlike the rest of the internet, data on this web lasts hundreds of years, doesn’t get deleted, and it's not centralized in the hands of big tech companies.
Why is the need for a decentralized storage platform so integral?
NFTs and Metaverse are great – but where is this data stored? Are you really just buying into a marketing tactic that can be removed at any time? I think in many cases, there are still misconceptions about NFTs and purchasers may not understand where their NFT data is stored. In many cases, the data is kept on platforms with little resiliency or where the authors can modify or change the underlying picture or music that the NFT claims ownership of. In my opinion, this is worse than the experience of collecting a physical piece of art, because nobody can walk into my home and modify the print hanging on my wall.
These tokenized assets must have their data stored on platforms that give their owners guarantees the data is immutable and long lasting outside of any single, centralized organization. The simple payment model and time-to-market with solution building on Arweave just make it the easiest choice for this.
What is the origin story of ArIO? How did the idea of the business come about?
It all started with ArDrive and the simple mission of making permanent storage accessible to everyone. In my background as an enterprise architect, I dealt a lot with document management and collaboration platforms, like OneDrive for Business, so I had familiarity with that area. I quit my job in the summer of 2020 to start ArDrive, an easy-to-use app that lets you upload, download and share your public or private files on Arweave. Thanks to the Arweave Open Web Incubator, I was able to network myself and the app and received some fundraising to support the earliest roadmap.
As we grew the team and our products, at the end of 2021 we saw more opportunities on the layer 2 infrastructure side of Arweave, specifically for Arweave Gateways. This was still an untamed beast in the sense that it was a centralized and potentially censorable aspect of the overall permaweb experience. So we envisioned a new gateway network that was open and easy to deploy, with a token to incentivize participants. We added some new features, like ArNS, and have been working towards its full release ever since.
Overall, it’s been a very organic process with a few real strategic shifts that I think has worked very well so far.
You have three different products. ArDrive, ArNS, and Gateways. Can you explain the differences?
ArDrive was our first flagship product. It was really meant to be a utility that anyone can easily use to upload, download and share their public or private data on Arweave on any device. In this case “anyone” can mean retail, business, web3 user or a developer, because ArDrive is a platform rather than merely an app. This is in part because ArDrive uses one of the first data protocols on Arweave called the ‘Arweave File System’, or ArFS. We had to create this protocol to ensure users could treat their Arweave data just like their drives, folders and files on their computers. So, in the past two years, we have built ArFS-enabled, open-source codebases which span web, native mobile, and command line apps along with other core utilities.
The Arweave Name System, ArNS, is a SmartWeave-based registry of friendly names for Arweave data. It is one of the core features of the AR.IO Network, as the registry names are paid for with the IO token, and served by the AR.IO Network Gateways. For example, you purchase the name “welcome” for your decentralized app uploaded to Arweave. You would be able to access that name and dapp through any AR.IO Network gateway’s domain eg. https://welcome.arweave.dev or https://welcome.g8way.io or https://welcome.permagate.io .These are some examples of existing alpha AR.IO gateways using our pilot test ArNS registry.
Gateways are what do all the heavy lifting on behalf of apps using Arweave. AR.IO Gateways are a piece of infrastructure that anyone will be able to run and provide a service for the whole permaweb, or just their app or community.
The first core job for a gateway is accepting transactions from apps and propagating them to the Arweave decentralized network. It then caches the data from all transactions so users can get really fast access to it. It rapidly indexes these transactions and serves rich queries so apps like ArDrive can find user data and many other things that support the permaweb app hosting experience.
Who’s the ideal customer of your products? Retail, institutional? Can you serve both?
ArDrive is certainly tailored to a retail audience right now, with lots of tooling for developers. We do have lots of web3 users who are deploying their massive NFT collections or really cutting-edge dapps on ArDrive, and it always blows my mind to see what kind of art is being created these days. ArNS helps all of these use cases by giving a friendly name over the standard Arweave transaction ID– how can you even remember those?
The ideal customer for a Gateway is certainly more technically sophisticated than the ArDrive user. This person would be mostly a developer, server admin, or tech team. The great thing about AR.IO, is that it could work for very small use cases like solo projects, or scale up for the largest kinds of enterprise data ingest and egress from Arweave.
We think that whether it is ArDrive, ArNS, Gateways, there is a potential use case if you need a solution for your permanent data, and we are always trying to make our products more accessible still as we try to serve everyone.
Can you explain the utility of the IO token?
The IO token is a SmartWeave token that will contain the AR.IO Network state and on-chain code. We are still exploring all utilities for it, but we are looking at a few primary features to start:
Currency for network services like purchasing ArNS names
Staking collateral for joining and operating a gateway in the AR.IO network
Staking collateral for participating in network governance proposals
Use rewards to incentivize network participants
The token ecosystem is really the mechanism that will be used to ensure that Gateway operation remains fair, open, and profitable in order to propagate access to the Permaweb across the globe now and forever.
How has ArDrive helped artists and creators? In the future, will there be a possibility to create an NFT off of the files saved in ArDrive and sell them directly on marketplaces like OpenSea?
Our community has been using ArDrive to store Ethereum-based NFTs and selling them on marketplaces like OpenSea since the NFT craze started. The great thing about ArDrive is that a creator can upload their data and metadata, pay for it once, and then reference that purchase in their token contract and not have to worry about it being deleted.
Creators have been moving their collections from IPFS to ArDrive and updating their contracts. There are some easy-to-follow videos on how to do it, and we have some tooling to help. We have not looked at a direct integration or cross-publication feature, as there seem to be lots of tools to create and manage token assets. We really listen to whatever the community wants to see from us, and we haven't heard much about this in the ArDrive app itself.
Can you explain how the technology behind the permanency of ArDrive works?
Arweave is a purpose-built blockchain for storing files, operated by miners, aka nodes, across the world. Data that is transacted to Arweave includes a large, one-time fee that covers the storage costs for over 200 years.
What are some of the gaps you see in the web3 space at present and what do you believe needs to happen to fill them?
More wallets and better overall UX, more education around key management, and clearer regulations from the US 3-letter organizations.
What advice would you give a new entrepreneur in this space?
It's hard to pinpoint the best advice but there are a few things that I wish I had known when I started.
One thing is to always identify the one-way decisions and treat them extra carefully. Whether these are decisions around deals/agreements, community, or protocol, you only get one shot in some cases as an entrepreneur. If you make the wrong one-way decision, it can damage you for a really long time in opportunity cost or otherwise.
Focus on what matters most, try to keep it simple, and fail fast. Sometimes there are a ton of competing priorities. Sometimes there may only be one or two projects to work on. Either way, it should always be on what matters most to get you to the next level.
In the web3 space, it's easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis, or over-engineering some complicated integration or solution. The space moves so fast, you just can't waste the time on something if it doesn’t end up technically working, scaling, or has a product market fit.
Be prepared to “sell not shill” your vision, your team, your protocols. If you can’t portray whatever it is you are building in a realistic way, and be confident about it, then who will follow you, build with you, or invest in you? This isn’t to say a solo, introvert developer cannot make a great entrepreneur, but it will just be a harder road in my opinion.
Why was Sino a good investor to team up with in your view?
Because they had the experience in the space, a good “brand name”, a solid network and most of all, exhibited a passion for the tech we are building. Sino has been a great partner in helping me execute the vision of our team and community. Financing aside, Sino has been incredibly valuable in networking us to other teams in the space. We offer a lot of things from ArDrive to AR.IO and they are always pitching us to their partners and getting us new opportunities. They have also been very helpful in providing feedback on our marketing and community strategy. Even going as far as providing concrete analysis and recommendations as to how we can grow and amplify our voice.