Announcing the Solana Arweave Interoperability Hack

by Solana Foundation

Announcing the Solana Arweave Interoperability Hack

Gitcoin Grant: https://gitcoin.co/issue/ArweaveTeam/Bounties/30/100023463

Today the Solana Foundation is excited to announce a collaboration with Arweave. We are both calling for developers to build a bridge between the Solana and Arweave projects. This bounty is now live on Gitcoin and includes a 15,000 DAI reward. You can learn more about the scope and rules of the bounty here!

Solana is a high-performance blockchain that can deliver up to 50,000 transactions a second. If the network was being consistently utilised at its full capacity, the protocol would generate 4 petabytes of data each year. This is a significant amount of data which needs to be stored somewhere. Similar issues have occurred with other blockchains as well, at one point it was suggested by Vitalik that it may make sense for Ethereum to start charging rent for storing the data, as it was becoming unfeasible to provide the service for free.

Blockchains are inherently ordered in a way such that if they were to be verified, this process would need to begin at the genesis block and continue all the way through to the tip of the chain. Therefore, it is critical that all of the data in the chain is reliably accessible in order to go back at any time and query the blockchain. This allows for the verification of the chain’s full state and confirmation of its integrity.

Arweave offers scalable and permanent data storage. Information stored on the Arweave network is backed by sustainable and perpetual endowments, and is tamper-proof, distributed, and decentralized. As a collectively owned hard drive, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history.

With this bridge, it will be possible for Solana to leverage the Arweave network for storage of the Solana ledger’s data, ensuring that this data can always be retrieved as required. The bridge will also remove the need for validators on the Solana network to run full nodes. Arweave is therefore a highly complementary solution to Solana and other high-performance blockchains that generate a lot of data.

The bounty will last for one month, beginning on Wednesday the 29th of July, and ending with the submission deadline at 23:59 PST on Friday the 28th of August. Thank you.