Understanding the Framework for Evolving Arweave.

Arweave is the permanent information storage system, engineered to fulfill a set of immutable principles. When the Arweave community says permanent, we mean it. Truly permanent storage requires a system of perpetual technical renewal to adapt to the ever-changing environment. That is why today we present the Framework for Evolving Arweave. This mechanism is the culmination of significant research, setting the immutable foundations that will ensure the fulfillment of the protocols’ vision.

As the force that transformed unicellular organisms into humans, evolution is a profound mechanism for adapting systems to survive in changing and hostile environments over time. The core of the framework presented here embraces and incentivizes evolution of the Arweave protocol. The social protocol that we are presenting is deliberate and succinct, encoded in just 261 English language words. Each word has been chosen with great care.

This companion to the framework provides explanation and context to the rules therein, aiding understanding of their emergent dynamics and incentives.

Mechanism Overview

At its core, the framework is a system that enables and rewards permissionless innovation on top of the Arweave protocol. This mechanism gives rise to a form of evolution: creating powerful incentives to generate, test and select preferable mutations of the protocol.

By allowing anyone to offer a mutation of the protocol with an associated reward, a market is created for improvements. Broadly, the mechanism functions as follows:

Innovators choose a prior iteration of the protocol on which to base their new work. They will select the parent for their innovation based on its perceived adoption and fitness.
Innovators then create a new mutation of the protocol with new features and offer it to the community, minting a new quantity of tokens that they believe represents reasonable reward for their contribution.
Finally, community members assess the new mutation, opting to use it above alternatives if it offers sufficient improvements at a reasonable dilution.

The outcome of this process is a protocol that evolves to adapt to its environment, maximizing ‘fitness’ -- its utility and robustness -- while minimizing dilution. As can be inferred, successful innovators will need to satisfy the two primary market participants: users of the protocol and other innovators. If they achieve this, they will receive a market-determined reward for their efforts.

In general, anyone attempting to build a permanent data storage system is incentivized to take part in this mechanism for three primary reasons:

Faithful participation in the mechanism allows them to bootstrap adoption by easily inheriting an activated, engaged user base. This maximizes the reward for their innovation, while minimizing expenses.
By participating in the mechanism faithfully, innovators can expect that their iteration will become part of the lineage of permanent data storage systems. Consequently, others will advance their protocol – carrying their data and tokens forward – without further effort on their behalf.
Any builder attempting to create a permanent information storage system will need a flexible and adaptive mechanism to respond to an environment that is certain to change over time. Once the framework for evolving Arweave is in motion, it will provide a simple solution to this problem that all can participate in without cost or limitation.

Considering that these advantages are available to innovators with very little true cost -- after all they may choose to dilute as much as they consider appropriate -- participation in the mechanism represents a preferable proposition.

Innovators are exposed to an additional powerful incentive: to maximize the value of their new evolution by merging the data of diverged lineages. This incentive emerges from the dynamic that a unified protocol will generally be more valuable than an evolution of a single strand of a diverged lineage. The most basic strategy for achieving this unification is constituted by two prongs: addressing the technical concerns of the divergent communities, and including the data from diverging forks into the new evolution. If executed correctly, this strategy of unification leaves little reason for community members to continue participating in the divergent fork, encouraging them to migrate their usage and token holdings to the new evolution.

Approximately, an innovator is incentivized to unify data from divergent forks in the evolutionary tree if the result of the following expression is positive:

V = (F_MC * C_D) - (F_MC * C_ND) - D_C + D_V

Where:

V: Net value gain or loss as a result of including the data from the divergent fork.

C_D: Proportion of market capitalization that will move from an old fork to a new one if the old data is included.

C_ND: Proportion of market capitalization that will move from an old fork to a new one regardless of whether the data is included.

F_MC: The market capitalization of the divergent fork in question.

D_C: The cost – in terms of necessary dilution – of copying the old data into the new evolution.

D_V: The intrinsic social value of having any data from the divergent fork included in the new evolution.

Given that the D_c term in this equation is typically small compared to F_MC, we can see that innovators are commonly incentivized to include data and unify the most prominent forks of the lineage. Subsequently, users can have confidence that their data will be included in the canonical version of the system as long as they upload their data to a network with appropriate prominence and usage.

When assessed in aggregate, the effect of these incentives is that token holders will accrue a basket of assets across different evolutions, while Arweave users can expect their data to be maintained by an ever-improving set of protocols as the network evolves.

Framework Components

Now that we have outlined the dynamics of the mechanism, we will progress through each of its components in turn.

Your new version of the system preserves all data from the prior version. You should additionally consider including all non-duplicated data from other well-utilized versions of the system in order to unify the communities and increase the value of your new iteration.

As a family of permanent information storage systems, it is crucial that not a single byte is removed from any of the iterations of the protocol over time. Failure to fulfill this would put the future of any other bytes added to the system in doubt, lessening the utility of that lineage of protocols. Conversely, abiding by this rule includes the iteration in the tree that can expect similar treatment from other innovators and users in the future. Further, innovators are also incentivized to unify divergent lineages of the protocol as outlined in the prior section.

Your new version of the system preserves all account balances from the prior version.

This clause ensures that innovators and stakeholders that participate in the protocol over time are rewarded for their contributions. Failing to abide by this principle would create an ‘expiry’ on tokens in that lineage of protocols, harming their value and the economic security of their mechanisms.

You create new rewards commensurate with your contribution to the lineage. Market forces will ultimately guide the level of compensation you receive for your contribution.

In order to incentivize the generation of new mutations of the protocol, we must also allow innovators to claim a reward for their contribution. As there will be many participants in the evolutionary process, they will find themselves in a market that assesses the benefits of their improvements against the costs – the dilution of the token supply that the innovator has claimed. An evolution that disproportionately rewards the innovators will find itself unable to gain adoption as the market will deem it unreasonable and will divest from its token supply. Consequently, those innovators will receive a lower net reward than if they had priced their new contributions fairly – as their tokens will not hold value. As innovators compete to provide value to the network, a functional market emerges, which maximizes fitness of the protocol’s evolutions in the environment for the minimal fair dilution.

There is no limit to the dilution that innovators can request, pending the acceptance of the market. This nullifies any incentive to build a new system from scratch, rather than innovating inside the existing framework.

Only forks abiding by the Arweave principles may validly claim a name derivative of Arweave, for example Arweave-X. Forks that do not abide by the principles are acceptable but must be labeled distinctly.

Arweave is a protocol that is specifically built to fulfill a set of immutable principles. Consequently, the framework directs that, while any innovations on top of the network may be undertaken, if they deviate from these principles, they should be named differently. This allows community members to clearly identify the latest versions of the Arweave protocol – implementing the vision set forth in its principles, while also enabling new innovations to emerge.

By allowing distinguishable deviations from the founding principles of Arweave, the family of protocols is able to evolve to fulfill many niches without sacrificing its initial vision. These non-Arweave derivatives can be understood as analogous to the emergence of new species. Innovators creating non-Arweave derivatives may want to consider providing their own set of principles to guide evolutions of protocols that carry their name.

Enforcement of the naming convention is carried out by the Arweave community, who should refuse to refer to non-conforming evolutions of the Arweave protocol by any suggested, Arweave-related name. Instead, they should refer to such evolutions in a different manner. For example, the community may choose to refer to a non-conforming version as ‘the fork of [date]’, or by a shortening of the block hash that the fork diverged at. Through this mechanism, the community is able to maintain the integrity of the Arweave ‘meme’ without enforced consensus.

Innovators must only lead a single evolution of the protocol. Upon release, this iteration should be complete and fully functional, although minor, non-dilutionary patches are admissible. After their iteration is complete, innovators should only hold a ceremonial role in the ecosystem.

The evolutionary framework is engineered to empower innovators. However, the role of these innovators is explicitly and deliberately time-limited. Each contribution to the protocol should be delivered in a complete form, allowing the community to assess its merits in totality, without reliance on any promises of future action.

It is important to highlight that Arweave’s evolutionary framework is not a process of electing rulers to fulfill a vision and a series of commitments, instead it is a process of selection between finalized offerings. By limiting each innovator to leading only one evolution of the protocol, they are incentivized to improve it to the maximum of their abilities, leaving nothing on the table.

In order to safeguard and progress the project of permanent information storage, all should carefully assess new evolutions of the system and adopt them if they provide legitimate solutions to real problems at fair dilution.

In order for this mechanism to function effectively, all community members should recognize their responsibility as selectors in the evolutionary process. We must view new innovations with open minds while responsibly assessing their merits and proposed rewards. The market that this community participation creates simultaneously directs innovators’ attention to problems it perceives as most pressing, while also ensuring they receive fair and competitive compensation.

Outlook

With this process in place, the Arweave protocol is positioned to adapt to new environments as they emerge over time. The Arweave 2.x protocol is engineered to last, including solutions to all currently foreseeable needs. Subsequently, this evolutionary process will bootstrap gently, manifesting a fully-fledged market only gradually as the environment around the protocol shifts. With this framework and the ingenuity of the Arweave community, the protocol rests on strong foundations to address future challenges and seize opportunities.