Arweave and Permanent Storage

Arweave markets itself as permanent storage: pay once upfront, and the network's endowment model is designed to pay miners for retrieval indefinitely. That permanence is probabilistic economics, not physics — it holds only while incentives and participation remain aligned.

Data is written as transactions bundled into blocks roughly every two minutes. Bundlers like Irys (formerly Bundlr) batch many small uploads into one on-chain transaction, reducing per-file overhead for NFT metadata and social posts.

Permanence suits legal records, journalism archives, and NFT art where mutability is a bug. It is expensive for frequently updated app state or large video libraries. Many teams store a canonical JSON on Arweave and keep hot media on IPFS or CDNs — permanent pointer, hybrid delivery.