Author: Kyle

Review: 0xmiddle

Source: Content Guild - News

Originally published on: PermaDAO

Original link: https://permadao.notion.site/300-Arweave-AO-2024-12-31-4b1595a336d043feb909af332936959f

1. Overview of Arweave & AO Network

Arweave network transaction volume exceeds 10 billion

Data source: ViewBlock

Data statistics time: December 31, 2024

The Arweave network reached the 10 billion transaction volume milestone on October 16, 2024. As of December 31, the transaction volume has reached 12.4 billion. Starting from the second half of 2024, the network has been growing at a rate of 900 million transactions per month.

In the past, it took 454 days for the network transaction volume to increase from 100 million to 1 billion; now it takes less than 30 days to increase from 9 billion to 10 billion. In addition, the Endowment Fund also broke through the 100,000 AR mark during this period. This shows how fast the network is growing.

AO network message volume continues to accelerate

Data source: AOLink

Data statistics time: December 31, 2024

The AO test network reached the 1 billion message milestone on December 13, 2024. As of December 31, the total number of messages on the AO test network was 1.26 billion.

From September 18 to December 31, the AO test network added 700 million messages, with an average daily message volume of 6.73 million, once again breaking the new record for the average daily growth rate (4.24 million from July 10 to September 18). In terms of network activity, the number of daily active users has basically remained above 10,000 recently.

Bridge assets and AO token minting

Data source: https://ao.arweave.net/#/mint

Data statistics time: December 31, 2024

According to the dashboard data:

• The total amount of $AO minted is 2,854,493.59 pieces, accounting for 13.6% of the total.
• The total amount of $stETH deposited is 129,268.95, with a total value of approximately US$430 million;
• The total amount of $DAI deposited is 142,171,223, with a total value of approximately $140 million;
• The total value of bridged assets is close to $600 million, of which $stETH accounts for 75.4% and $DAI accounts for 24.6%.

Arweave Protocol Upgrade

The Arweave protocol has activated version 2.8.0 at block height 1547120 at 14:00 UTC on November 13, 2024. This update includes a composite packaging mechanism, block header format adjustment, price mechanism optimization, and performance improvements, aiming to improve network efficiency, reduce resource consumption, and enhance system stability.

Soon after, in mid-December, Arweave 2.9.0 was released, which once again lowered the hard disk threshold and improved network efficiency. However, this Arweave 2.9.0 version is an early access version and will not be officially activated until 14:00 UTC on February 3, 2025.

2. AO Ecosystem Overview

3. Inventory and analysis of each track project

DeFi

Permaswap has developed rapidly during this period, and its business focus has shifted to the AO ecosystem. The project has also achieved full open source and complete decentralization, allowing anyone to list coins and add liquidity independently. Permaswap has launched tokens such as $Kredit, $qAR, $NAB, $BP and $PIXL, and introduced functions such as Multi-Hop Trading and Spot, providing liquidity for user transactions through multiple channels. At the same time, Permaswap has also launched incentive activities for trading pairs such as wUSDC/wAR, Kredit/wAR, and tARIO/wAR to encourage users to participate in liquidity mining. During this period, the Permaswap team followed the development and launched the FusionFi protocol as a unified framework for financial agents (Agents), and began to explore the financial scenarios and possibilities of AgentFi.

FusionFi Protocol (FFP) has been fully open source since its launch. It is independent of Permaswap and aims to become a public product of the AO ecosystem, providing tools such as blueprints and SDKs to help developers get started quickly. In fact, not only Permaswap, but also projects such as Lagent and LLama Land are practical applications of FFP in terms of development framework. FFP has also released a token economic model, and will build an FFP project ecosystem based on it in the future.

Autonomous Finance also made a big move and launched two products: Botega and CoinBurner. Botega is an autonomous proxy DEX, which is special in that it supports advanced trading functions (such as DCA and stop loss order functions). Since its launch, Botega has been actively launching AO ecological tokens and liquidity pools, and has also issued $AGENT airdrops. As a new DEX, Botega has received a good market response overall, both in terms of trading volume and user participation. CoinBurner is a token destruction platform that supports querying and verifying token destruction records.

Aolotto is the first decentralized lottery protocol in the AO ecosystem, which was officially launched on the first day of 2025. Its main slogan is "$1 on-chain lottery". Through the innovative Bet2Mint minting mechanism, $ALT tokens are fairly distributed to community members who participate in the betting. Aolotto has also cooperated with AOX and Typr. Users can easily mint $wUSDC for betting through AOX, and can also obtain lottery announcement information on the Typr platform.

Lagent is a newly launched lending platform, driven by AI agents, with completely user-defined lending rules. Its products have not yet been announced, but the official website is online. At the same time, Lagent has cooperated with AOX, so that assets (wAR, wUSDC) will no longer be idle after crossing the chain to the AO ecosystem.

aoVest has launched the testnet and introduced the Classic Airdrop feature. It plans to launch Conditional Airdrops, atomic asset trading and other features, as well as issue platform tokens.

Veritas has also launched its official website and introduced the on-chain analysis panel function, which currently covers most ecological projects. An analysis and prediction market based on on-chain data will be launched in the future.

BazAR teamed up with AO to officially issue a set of atomic assets: Omega One, which is used to incentivize users to bridge DAI to the AO network. In addition, BazAR has maintained active user engagement, mainly due to the traffic brought by Dumdumz NFT. Of course, during this period, BazAR also launched several new NFTs, including the Cyberbeavers series of ao Builders and the AO WAR series created by FUDBear.

Wallet

ArConnect performed very well in the fourth quarter of 2024. The product was continuously iterated, and features such as "Print to Arweave" and subscription were launched one after another. At the same time, the total number of wallet addresses exceeded 250,000. However, the most noteworthy thing is the release of ArConnect mobile terminal, which greatly improved the ecological user experience. With the successive upgrades and optimizations of the mobile terminal, the interactive experience has been close to the mainstream wallet of Web3, and users can access most ecological projects safely and easily.

aoWebWallet has also released a new version, launching the Action Builde function, which allows users to query process information by entering the process ID. At the same time, aoWebWallet supports users to independently create and deploy their own tokens, and can also mint and pledge tokens through the Meme Frames function.

Infra

AR.IO is one of the most eye-catching projects during this period. Not only has the ArNS domain name launched been widely used by ecological projects, but the project has also been repositioned as the first Permanent Cloud Network. The project seems to have been assisted by God after participating in the Permissionless event. On the one hand, the team has been strengthened, such as Patrick's joining and the release of the ambassador recruitment plan; on the other hand, the project cooperation and incentive plans have been actively promoted, including cooperation with Ewigkeit, KYVE and Perplex, providing support for Turbo or SDK services, and launching the Gateway Operator incentive plan. In terms of gateway node software, AR.IO has iterated from version 17 to the latest version 20, and the functions have been comprehensively upgraded. In addition, AR.IO also released a new white paper v2, the token symbol was changed to $ARIO, the smart contract was migrated to AO, and the smart contract audit was completed through FYEO.

The WeaveVM project has been working hard to serve as a bridge between various public chains and the Arweave & AO ecosystem. Although it is not a high-profile project, the progress made is very commendable, as evidenced by the explosive growth in its network transaction volume and the number of wallets. During this period, WeaveVM has successively completed the integration of Optimism, SVM, SEDA, Substrate Chain, EigenDA and Avalanche, connecting Arweave storage functions to major public chain ecosystems, and further expanding the possibilities of Dapp. As for the WeaveVM project, it has released a new Alphanet v3, which has greatly improved network performance; it has also launched a Rust SDK for AO, such as rusty-ao, which allows developers to easily generate AO processes, obtain messages and test calls in Rust applications.

EverPay's Everloot series of activities has also reached its ninth phase, which is also the most generous one. This phase aims to encourage users to provide liquidity for wUSDC/wAR on Permaswap to participate in mining, so that they can share $HALO, $tAOX, and have the opportunity to win rare Dumdumz NFTs. In addition, everPay has suspended the deposit function of tokens such as $0RBT, $EXP, $TRUNK and $wAR, guiding users to migrate their assets to the AO network for use.

RedStone remains active, continues to expand its oracle ecosystem, and has reached partnerships with multiple public chains and more than 10 projects to provide price feed services, continuing to expand its influence. The community is also very active, and the Memethon event has been held for the fourth season, encouraging the community to create meme works together.

The WeaveDB team has launched several products, including ArNext (Permaapps development framework), PassAR (event management platform), AOForge (CLI tool), Arche (AI Agent) and WAO (Wizard AO SDK). The Nigerian branch of WeaveDB is more active, not only developing new products, but also collaborating with local universities or communities to expand its developer team.

0rbit has upgraded its architecture to AOS 2.0, simplifying the operation of obtaining real-world data from AO processes. Primus has completed its brand reshaping and officially changed its name from PADO to Primus; at the same time, its Primus Extension has exceeded 200,000 users, and will launch a Developer Hub in the future to facilitate developer integration. RandAO is a newly launched cryptographic random number generator that has completed integration with Satoshi's Palace.

Developer Tools

Protocol.Land has provided a lot of support for hackathon competitions within the ecosystem. Whether it is the Builder Program event launched in cooperation with ao Ventures or the Arweave India Hacker House, Protocol.Land is responsible for hosting the project's code base to be stored on Arweave. In addition, it also cooperated with Astro Labs to introduce $qAR for tokenized repurchase agreements.

Arlink and Sentio are both projects born from the Arweave India Hacker House competition. Arlink, as a platform for simplifying project deployment, was used by most projects in the third Hacker House; Sentio launched an audit vulnerability check function and plans to provide monitoring services for trading bots in the future.

Liteseed has optimized the process of uploading data to Arweave, fixed issues such as data format, Merkle tree verification, and gateway path, while improving system stability and documentation quality.

WAO is a newly launched SDK tool designed specifically for AO development. It was developed by Tomo (founder of WeaveDB) during the third Hacker House and supports memory simulation, fast testing, message optimization, and simplified GraphQL operations.

Bridge

AOX has launched a new official website and introduced a dynamic fee mechanism, focusing on optimizing the user experience. At the same time, AOX has also opened up a channel with CEX, supporting users to transfer CEX's $USDC to the AO network. In addition, AOX has also reached cooperation with projects such as LiquidOps, Outcome and Aolotto to provide a broader application scenario for $wAR and $wUSDC. At present, the minting volume of $wAR is 46,783 pieces and the number of holders is 37,605**; the minting volume of $wUSDC is 200,422 pieces and the number of holders is 386. **

Astro Labs has released a public beta version of Quantum, and also launched a new packaged $AR standard - $qAR, which has been adopted by multiple projects and has performed well in trading volume. At the same time, Quantum has also updated its products to improve overall fluency and security. In addition, Astro Labs has reached a strategic cooperation with Copper.co to integrate institutional-level MPC infrastructure into Quantum, bringing higher standards for asset custody and liquidity management.

NFT

Dumdumz NFT continues to attract market attention. Keystone not only supports compatibility, but also launched a limited edition Dumdumz hardware wallet. The Dumdumz team is also full of energy and released an ambitious roadmap. At the same time, it developed the Dumverse game and AOction House auction platform to continue to empower Dumdumz NFT. During this period, Dumdumz NFT was also once snatched up by the market, with the floor price reaching as high as 50 $wAR, which has increased 252 times compared to the issue price.

Meka Human also developed the game Meka City based on NFT elements (only open to holders), and issued the token $Kredit, which was listed on Permaswap. Meka Human has received market attention second only to Dumdumz, and its floor price has risen to 7.8 $wAR, which has increased 26 times from the issue price.

Hoodrats NFT is a relatively new series of atomic assets, created by Eltio, and also participated in the auction of the AOction House platform. This series has also attracted market attention, and the floor price has risen to 2.5 $wAR, which has increased 25 times compared to the issue price.

AI

Llama Land has launched several new NPCs, including the trading NPC developed by Permaswap, the media company NPC developed by PermaDAO community developer txohyeah, the AI-driven Remember NPC, and the Llamaswap NPC that can exchange assets, etc. In addition, Llama Land integrates the Vouch protocol to prevent robot users. However, in the end, all $Llama tokens will be issued through Llama King (Llama 3 model driven) at the end of December 2024, with a total of 11,111,111.

Apus Network has also made good progress during this period. In addition to actively promoting partnerships with various projects, it has also successfully concluded two competition pool activities and established a good community foundation. With the previous continuous testing and optimization of the product, Apus Network has finally released Litepapers and launched the Token Generation Event (TGE). Users can mint APUS tokens by staking stETH and DAI. Currently, the pledged assets exceed 500 stETH and 250,000 DAI.

Obtimus is a newly launched AI twin survival game platform designed for $AR and $AO holders. The platform generates an AI avatar for each user, earns points through random battles, and distributes airdrops or rewards based on the points. The Obtimus platform quickly attracted market attention and established an active community. Obtimus subsequently introduced the bonding curve mechanism as a launch pad for $BCAT (Memecoin), seemingly intending to transform into the pump.fun of the AO ecosystem.

Arche is a single AI developed by Mardeni, built on Meta's Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct model, trained by feeding Sam Williams' X account historical data, with a humorous and sarcastic style. If you pay enough attention to the ecosystem dynamics, you will see Arche in the comment section of various projects. In the future, Arche also plans to become a coding assistant, access social channels, participate in the DeFi ecosystem, and launch an interactive reward system.

Meme

BENCAT ($BCAT) is perhaps the most popular Memecoin in the AO ecosystem. This project was only launched in late November, and quickly attracted everyone's attention by continuously publishing cat-themed Meme pictures and inflammatory texts on the X platform. Of course, BENCAT's rapid popularity is inseparable from the team's operational capabilities. They quickly reached cooperation with multiple ecological projects and were retweeted by AO officials many times. In the end, $BCAT was launched on Permaswap and token airdrops were launched simultaneously. On the day of the launch, $BCAT once caused the Permaswap network to be blocked, and the market value soared to 5.52 million US dollars.

NumberAlwaysBigger ($NAB) was launched almost at the same time as BENCAT. Users can obtain $NAB by staking $wAR or $qAR, or adding liquidity on decentralized exchanges such as Permaswap and Botega. In addition, NumberAlwaysBigger also launched the first $NAB bounty task activity, where users can also obtain $NAB by obtaining $FRP points and staking.

Social

DecentraMind not only continues to optimize product functions, but also actively promotes multiple collaborations. Currently, projects such as Veritas, CryptoGo, Trends, Permaverse and Apus Network have settled in the platform. At the same time, DecentraMind has released a number of bounty tasks, and through a complete scoring system, the rewards are accurately distributed to community contributors, which improves the community's activity and contribution quality.

Typr proposed the concept of "social agent" and is committed to building a huge social network driven by agents. Currently, Typr has reached cooperation with projects such as AOX and Aolotto, and has become one of the official platforms for Aolotto to publish lottery announcements. In the future, Typr will develop voting functions and integrate them into the Story section to further provide more interactive and creative support for creators and users.

Game

The Cyberbeavers battle game developed by ao Builders has launched an Asian node, which is dedicated to serving Asian users during fixed time periods. Subsequently, Cyberbeavers also tried the game's all-weather mode, allowing players to experience the game at any time. At the same time, the game has added a HORDE mode, which supports up to 10 players to collaborate and pass levels without accidental injuries, increasing the playability of the game.

The-Loom, a metaverse platform, launched The Knight Fall, a multiplayer platform jumping game. At the same time, The-Loom released LoomSDK as a bridge between Unity and AO to help AO ecosystem game development.

The Permaverse platform remains highly active, with more than 12,000 registered users and 4,000 daily active users. At the same time, Permaverse launched the Unity SDK, providing new tools for creating 3D autonomous worlds on the chain. It is worth noting that the platform is about to launch the $DUMDUM airdrop.

Community Labs has invested in the gaming platform Basejump, which will launch an AI-driven game in early 2025. At the same time, developer davidkong also announced that the game StarGridBattle will be launched in the second quarter of 2025.

Incubator / Community

During this period, PermaDAO has undergone a major transformation, from a public welfare service DAO to a profit-making organization with ecosystem incubation as its core. In the past two years, PermaDAO has had 728 members on board, created more than 1,300 articles, and held more than 300 events, injecting strong vitality into the Arweave/AO community. In the future, PermaDAO will provide community-driven incubation services for the ecosystem with a new identity.

Arweave India has not only successfully held three Hacker House hackathons, but also provided technical and resource assistance to builders through offline reporting meetings, Founder's Camp and other activities, effectively promoting communication and cooperation among community members. In addition, Arweave India has also cooperated with projects such as Protocol.Land and Astro Labs to provide more support and opportunities for future hackathon activities.

Arweave Philippines is continuously increasing its influence. In addition to hosting multiple online seminars, it has also launched Builders' Meet events and participated in activities such as Bulacan State University IT Week. These initiatives provide local developers with opportunities for communication and cooperation, which will help promote the popularization and application of Arweave technology in the Philippines.

Weavers actively promotes the development of the ecosystem through activities and content, launched the WeaveCast podcast series, and successfully held the second PermaHacks hackathon. The specific details of PermaHacks will be introduced in the hackathon section.

In addition, the Arweave Japan and Arweave New York **** communities were also announced, aiming to gather builders, innovators and creative people from Japan, New York and surrounding areas to promote the development of Arweave technology and ecology.

4. Important events (hackathons, podcasts)

PermaHacks

PermaHacks is an online hackathon event hosted by Weavers. AO officially released 7 sets of bounty tasks in cooperation with WeaveVM, Astro, AR.IO , BazAR, BetterIDEa, 0rbit and other projects, with a total prize of up to 22,500 US dollars. After two weeks of discussion and construction, 8 winning projects were finally selected:

• Everlink: A decentralized link management platform based on Arweave, similar to Linktree.
• Qpay: A decentralized payment application for customers that uses $qAR to enable fast and secure payments on the AO network.
• Qbit-pay: A decentralized payment solution based on AO, inspired by payment solutions such as Solana Pay.
• Secrettory: A decentralized secret management tool based on the AO network, designed for teams to securely share sensitive information such as passwords and API keys.
• Iris: A decentralized short video platform based on WeaveVM, similar to TikTok, that supports content creators to publish short videos and accept user rewards.
• WeaveMint: An NFT minting platform based on Arweave, providing efficient, gas-free NFT minting services.
• Better IDEa Copilot and Composer: An intelligent programming tool with an integrated AI assistant in BetterIDEa, designed to improve developers' coding efficiency.
• Junction: A link page creation tool based on AO, with permanent storage, easy-to-remember domain names, data analysis and reward functions.
• Bazar NFT Awards: Crown of Lies, Permagirl and Permbird, Founder Map.

Arweave Fullstack Hackathon

Arweave Fullstack Hackathon is co-hosted by Only Arweave and requires that at least 50% of the participants are new to the ecosystem and use Arweave, AO or ArFleet technology for project development. Excellent projects not only have the opportunity to win prizes, but may also receive additional official equity funding. The event attracted more than 300 participants, with a total of 30 projects submitted, and 5 winning projects were finally selected:

• A(\) Labs: A cross-chain platform based on zero-knowledge proof, connecting EVM and AO network.
• Dumpet: A decentralized betting platform where users can bet on any event.
• aoMuseum: A historical record storage platform based on Arweave.

The other two winning projects are Junction and Qpay, which are also the winning projects in the above-mentioned PermaHacks.

Arweave India Hacker House

Arweave India gathers 30 developers and designers for each Hacker House hackathon, forming a team of 3 to develop projects. During this period, Arweave India successfully held the second Hacker House Demo Day, showcasing four relatively mature projects:

• ARlink: A platform that simplifies PermaWeb deployment and provides one-click hosting services for developers.
• Veritas: A fair launch funding platform focused on community-driven token issuance and project analysis.
• aoVest: An automated token distribution platform that supports minting, release and airdrops.
• Sentio: Code auditing platform that provides real-time monitoring capabilities.

In addition, the third Hacker House of Arweave India was successfully held, incubating 8 new projects. They are:

• Hagrid: A decentralized search engine.
• AO Learn: A decentralized machine learning framework.
• Ctrl Play: A classic mini-game platform with social functionality.
• Anon: AI-based full-stack DApp builder.
• EduMint: A short video platform for education.
• AOplay: On-chain gaming market.
• Kapsul: On-chain API aggregation platform.
• Ark: Search engine and data exploration platform.

Protocol.Land Builder Program

The Builder Program is a development program jointly organized by Protocol.Land and ao Ventures, which aims to encourage developers to develop projects and issue tokens using Protocol.Land and Arweave technologies. Three outstanding projects were finally born:

• Perma Butler: An Arweave-based storage platform that triggers storage through tweet tags.
• Jobsy: A job search and recruitment platform that uses LLM technology to match individuals with recruiters.
• Molecule Protocol: An open source data ownership project that helps users control, manage and share data.

Podcasts are starting to take off

AO officially held two episodes of the Hack and Tell podcast, inviting Sam Williams to have in-depth conversations with Teng Yan and Phil Mataras. In addition, AO officially plans to launch a biweekly Space series - DUH (Decentralized Underground Headquarters), inviting core builders of the ecosystem to share exclusive insights.

In addition, Arweave Oasis launched the Tech Talk podcast, Weavers also launched the WeaveCast podcast series, and PermaDAO and ao builders will also hold Space talk events from time to time.

V. Conclusion

December 23, 2024 is the 300th day since the release of the AO testnet, and less than 50 days from the launch of the AO mainnet. As a relatively young ecosystem, AO still lacks market attention. But if the volume of bridging assets of US$600 million is roughly calculated as the public chain TVL, according to DefiLlama data, AO just squeezes into the top 15 (after Optimism). In any case, AO has successfully attracted the attention of funds.

At the same time, AO's innovative architecture is gradually being recognized by the public, and the team of believers with a high degree of consensus is also growing. Of course, the growth of network data and the number of wallets can reflect that the ecosystem is becoming more and more vibrant. In particular, Dumdumz NFT and BENCAT ($BCAT) have caused network congestion due to market pursuit.

In addition, as the mainnet approaches, the resources of the AO ecosystem are clearly tilted towards developers. By continuously holding hackathons and frequently launching developer tools and platforms, it has not only attracted a large number of new builders, but also promoted the emergence of many AI, DeFi, game and Meme projects. At the same time, the ecosystem has begun to get rid of the "halal" image and began to embrace Meme culture. Talk activities (such as podcasts) have gradually emerged; projects have also become more focused on content planning and product operations, and the output forms are becoming increasingly diversified and refined.

In short, the development of the AO ecosystem in the fourth quarter of 2024 can be summarized in 12 words: continued growth, beginning of activity, and local outbreak. More than 300 days of precipitation have laid a solid foundation for the launch of the main network and provided fertile ground for the outbreak of the next generation of applications.