A few weeks ago, we took a snapshot of the Arweave ecosystem. Our largest takeaway was the lack of consumer-focused products built using permanent data storage. In short, we’re going to change that.
First, a step back. Over the years, Arweave as a technology has progressed from storing newspaper clippings to a robust, hyper scalable application layer. Our thesis that data storage protocols are the most permissionless for innovation is playing out, but harnessing each new ability requires a new tool. We can see examples with permaweb gateways making permanent data accessible (ar.io), bundles solving for infinite scalability (Bundlr), and smart contracts capable of being written in any language (Warp).
To date, Community Labs’ focus has been eliminating as many barriers to entry as possible for people to onboard, build, and use applications on Arweave in the form of composable Lego bricks. We’re proud to say that onboarding as a user to an Arweave application has gone from >20 steps to 2, and onboarding as a developer only needs 1 tool rather than 8. With that said, we see this work as table stakes for creating a viable path to a new landscape of composable consumer applications.
Why consumer?
We now have the tooling and the infrastructure; the ecosystem is finally ready for its next big wave of end users, and we’re aiming to bring them.
The first product our team built in 2020, a content delivery network for developer code powered by Arweave (nest.land), was one of the first to find product market fit in Arweave with a group of users that had zero web3 background or experience. At its peak, it had >30% share in its market with >100% mo/mo growth, >20 open source collaborators, and cost $0/mo to maintain. It was a consumer-focused web2 product that solved a critical need, was uniquely powered by Arweave, and fully leveraged its advantages. These are conditions I have been focused on recreating at scale ever since.
Today I’m excited to announce some initiatives we’re pursuing with a focus on bringing end users into Arweave under a similar approach:
Lotus: the first stablecoin to arrive on Arweave. The smart contract environment needs a store of value to hold liquidity for the web of value.
Oases: tokenized and fractionalized property ownership. The goal of Oases is to bring liquidity to the real estate market by making properties for vacation goers and digital nomads more affordable to own through fractional ownership.
Protocol Land: fully decentralized and incentivized source control. Protocol Land exists to solve the problem of every web3 codebase living in a centrally-governed web2 environment while introducing contribution incentives.
If you’re interested in contributing to the development of these projects or you have an idea of your own, get in touch by filling out the form on communitylabs.com.
