The ecosystem is taking shape. What are the highlights of the super-parallel computer Arweave AO one month after its release?

Author: Kyle

Reviewer: Sandy

Since the hyperparallel computer AO announced the launch of the testnet on February 27, it has received great attention from the market. The price of AR coin has also risen sharply against the trend three times when the market fell. During this period, it rose to 47.5 US dollars, which has achieved a nearly 13-fold increase from the bottom of the bear market last year. After the launch of AO, some people began to describe Arweave as the Ethereum killer again, and some people defined it as the computing layer of AI. It is foreseeable that Arweave AO may change the direction of the future crypto world.

At the same time, within three and a half weeks after its release, AO attracted more than 3,000 developers to join the Arweave ecosystem and participate in its construction. A large number of AO applications emerged in a short period of time, and the momentum of growth has been maintained. In order to fully understand the development of AO, this article will focus on the AO network overview, ecological projects and key events, and review the progress made by AO in the past month since its release.

AO Basics

The AO computer is an actor oriented machine that spawns from a network of nodes that adhere to its core data protocol, running on the Arweave network. This document briefly introduces the protocol and its capabilities as well as the technical details so that builders can create new implementations and services that integrate with it. The AO computer is a single, unified computing environment (a single system image) hosted on a set of heterogeneous nodes in a distributed network. AO aims to provide an environment where any number of parallel processes can reside and be coordinated through an open messaging layer. This messaging standard connects the machine’s independently running processes into a “network”, just like websites run on independent servers but are connected into a cohesive, unified whole through hyperlinks. - “AO Cookbook”

In order to understand AO more intuitively, we can understand it through a simple example and compare it with Ethereum EVM.

Suppose there is a task to calculate the sum of all integers from 1 to 100.

• For AO: Tasks can be assigned to different node computers for independent execution, and then collaborate through the AO network. For example, the task of calculating the sum of 1 to 50 is assigned to node 1, and the task of calculating the sum of 51 to 100 is assigned to node 2.
• For Ethereum EVM: Each node must perform the same calculation process, that is, calculate the sum of all integers from 1 to 100. This not only leads to computational redundancy, but even if some nodes have completed the calculation, they still need to wait for other nodes to complete the calculation before executing the following task.

This is the imagination space brought by super parallel computers. To understand AO better, let’s take a deeper look at some important concepts about AO:

• Messages - the basic data protocol unit (interaction medium) in AO, which conforms to the Arweave native ANS-104 data standard.
• Threads (Processes) - responsible for receiving and sending messages. Different processes communicate by passing messages.
• Units - Messenger Unit (MU), Scheduler Unit (SU) and Compute Unit (CU).
• AOS - operating system on AO. Developers can easily write code through AOS and interact with other AO processes.

For more information about AO’s structure, operating principles, and development guidelines, please refer to AO Cookbook.

AO Network Overview

The AO testnet has been active since its release, with 1,000,000 messages on the sixth day after release. The number of messages has been growing steadily since then, reaching 11,000,000 on the AO “full moon” day.

At the same time, the number of active developers in the AO network reached over 2,000 per day, and remained above 500 active developers for more than one-third of the time.

List of AO Ecosystem Projects

Labs Organization: Forward Research, everVision, Community Labs

Forward Research, everVision, and Community Labs are all established leading companies in the Arweave ecosystem. Among them, Forward Research was officially established at the Arweave in Asia event in 2022, with Arweave founder Sam directly serving as CEO, focusing on incubating and supporting new ecological projects.

everVision is a company focused on providing infrastructure for Web3. It has launched a number of products - everPay, Permaswap and Web3Infra, and initiated the PermaDAO organization to build a complete community-driven financial ecosystem.

Community Labs is a software development company and venture capital studio that aims to help developers seamlessly enter Arweave to increase the impact of the ecosystem. Its products include Arconnect, Protocol.Land and Astro Protocol.

infrastructure

everPay: A millisecond-level, 0 gas cross-chain payment protocol

everPay is a financial protocol built on the SCP paradigm, with performance and user experience comparable to Web2 applications, and very smooth operation. After the release of AO, everPay plans to adjust each component to AO’s MSG standard to achieve everPay’s complete decentralization, permissionless and censorship resistance. From now on, anyone can use EverID to easily access everPay through the AO network to complete asset transactions.

0rbit: Oracle based on AO

0rbit is a decentralized oracle built on AO by the Arweave ecosystem. It transmits any data from the on-chain and off-chain worlds to the AO thread and allows users to retrieve any data from any URL.

0rbit soon launched a new feature, POST, which supports publishing any data in the AO thread to the off-chain world. At the same time, 0rbit issued its test token $0RBT and launched it on the decentralized exchange Bark, which can be converted into native tokens after the mainnet is launched in the future. If you want to get $0RBT, in addition to exchanging it with $CRED on Bark, you can also complete the bounty tasks issued by 0rbit (such as building a price feed robot) or make other contributions to the construction of the 0rbit network.

Arconnect: Arweave native wallet

Arconnect is the native wallet of the Arweave ecosystem. Some people are used to calling it the “little hedgehog” wallet. After the launch of AO, Arconnect quickly announced support for all AO native tokens. At the same time, users can also receive messages sent on AO after turning on the wallet’s “notification” function.

AOVM: The first EVM-compatible blockchain on AO

AOVM is the first EVM-compatible blockchain system built on AO, designed to allow users to have their own personal AO, just like having a dedicated server in a computer matrix, waiting to issue orders at any time.

DeFi

Permaswap: Arweave’s first cross-chain DEX

Permaswap is the first cross-chain DEX in the Arweave ecosystem. It is built on the everPay protocol. Its atomic orders are executed in real time by everPay, with features such as no gas fees, zero front-running slippage, and millisecond-level transaction speeds. With everPay’s adaptation to AO, all functions of Permaswap will also automatically adapt to AO, introducing multi-chain assets to the AO ecosystem and providing atomic trading functions. In addition, Permaswap has launched the CRED/AR trading pair (CRED is the AO testnet token).

Astro and Bark: AO Stablecoin Protocol and DEX

Astro and Bark are both products developed by Community Labs on AO and were launched simultaneously on the day AO was officially released.

Astro is a stablecoin protocol on AO. Its native stablecoin USDA will be overcollateralized and minted by Arweave’s native token $AR. USDA will open up new innovation and growth opportunities for application scenarios such as decentralized financial platforms and digital markets within the Arweave ecosystem.

Bark is AO’s first decentralized exchange with low latency and high throughput. Thanks to AO, Bark supports parallel trading pairs and the settlement speed is much faster than centralized exchanges. At the same time, through AO’s unified message format, any developer who builds an Ethereum virtual machine or Solana virtual machine on the network can interact with Bark. Due to the high composability of Bark, developers can also build autonomous agents on it. Currently, Bark has launched assets such as $CRED, $0RBT, $TRUNK and $BRKTST.

development tools

Liteseed: The new bundler network

Liteseed is a new bundler built on AO, which uses bundle technology (similar to Rollup) to bundle data and upload it to Arweave. What is different is that Liteseed runs a group of bundlers on AO and works simultaneously. When a user makes a request, the network will randomly select a bundler to upload the data to Arweave.

Warp: A smart contract platform based on Arweave

Warp Contracts is an enhanced smart contract platform built on Arweave that can easily create atomic NFTs and can also serve as the base layer of a distributed database. After the release of AO, Warp will run on AO as an independent process, taking full advantage of the scalability and interoperability brought by AO.

Molecular ution Machine: Serverless Platform

Molecular ution Machine (MEM) is a serverless platform for the Arweave ecosystem, which allows developers to focus on writing code without having to worry about the management of the underlying server. MEM is advancing the work of two-way integration with AO, and is committed to acting as an open computing oracle for AO to help AO unify computing on Arweave. In addition, MEM plans to bridge the interactions between different virtual machines and blockchain networks into the AO process. The ERC20 cross-chain bridge it has built has just passed the security audit, and it is expected that ERC20 tokens can be introduced into AO soon.

CosmWasm: Launching AO’s Cosmos Ecosystem Smart Contract Platform

CosmWasm is a smart contract platform designed specifically for the Cosmos ecosystem. It recently announced the launch of the AO network, which can be used to send and receive messages with other smart contracts. At the same time, CosmWasm released the cosmwasm-ao (CWAO) tool, which allows developers to easily build smart contracts on AO using the Rust language.

BetterDEa: AO’s next generation IDE

BetterIDEa is a next-generation IDE (integrated development environment) tailored for the AO ecosystem, providing Web3 developers with an online platform similar to Colab. It is seamlessly integrated with AO’s on-chain computing engine, allowing developers to efficiently use Lua to write smart contracts and easily build Web3 applications.

DataOS: AI-powered blockchain browser

DataOS is an AI-driven blockchain browser built on an open data lake. After the release of AO, it promptly launched the real-time AO message browser AOLink, which intuitively presents data such as messages, threads, modules and user volume to users.

ViewBlock: Arweave’s main blockchain browser

ViewBlock is Arweave’s main blockchain browser. It has become the second AO browser in addition to DataOS. Users can access it to view relevant data of the AO network.

Key Events

Introducing AO Technical Documentation Cookbook

The concept of AO hyperparallel computer is very new to many people with non-technical backgrounds, and the technical details are relatively obscure. However, the official soon released its technical documentation Cookbook, which includes conceptual explanations, operating principles and development tutorials, and teaches everyone how to get started. In addition, the PermaDAO Development Association participated in the translation of AO Cookbook, which currently has two versions, English and Chinese.

AO releases testnet token $CRED and initiates bounty tasks

$CRED is the native token of the AO testnet. The number of $CRED held is equivalent to the amount of contribution to the AO testnet. Currently, $CRED is mainly obtained by completing bounty tasks, including completing Begin tasks, building Web UI using AOS, outputting AO-related content on the X platform, designing and deploying OA games, and writing a library for AO in Lua, etc.

AO Online Hackathon——Hack The Weave Hackathon

Hack The Weave Hackathon is an 11-day online hackathon competition for the Arweave community. Unlike previous hackathons, this hackathon is mainly centered around AO, with multiple prizes such as “Full-Stack Permaweb Application”, “Indexer/LLMs” and “MemeFrame Championship”, with a total bounty of more than $10,000.

Community launches two AO memecoins——$WHAT and $TRUNK

• $WHAT is launched by developer Andy (@cryptowanderer) and can be exchanged with $CRED on its official website. $WHAT holders can stake to have proposal rights. For more information, please visit the $WHAT official website.
• $TRUNK was launched by the community manager of the Sarcophagus project and supports the use of $CRED for exchange in the decentralized exchange Bark. Currently, the gameplay and empowerment of the token are the same as $WHAT. For more information, please visit the $TRUNK official website.

AO social media application AO Twitter is gradually improving

PermaDAO Development Guild contributor iamgamelover (@digyourinsight) is building AO Twitter based on AO, and has gradually launched features such as chat rooms, avatar settings, and bookmarks. He plans to launch MUD games in the future.

Summary

The launch of AO has transformed Arweave into a storage and computing platform that can host any application. As long as the AO protocol specifications are followed, whether it is a Web3 full-stack application, or an AI application that the market has paid close attention to recently, or even a Web2 application, it can run on AO and can be interconnected with other AO applications. Judging from the market’s reaction, there seems to be a tendency for Arweave to be closely tied to the concept of AI. Its scalability and unlimited storage capacity have created optimistic conditions for AI applications. Of course, it is not limited to AI applications. The birth of AO has brought new possibilities to the entire blockchain world.

AO, which has only been around for a month, has attracted a large number of investors and developers to join, and the ecosystem has begun to take shape. This may be a technological innovation that will change the future direction of blockchain.