Arwave launches public testnet for ‘hyper parallel’ AO protocol.

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Arweave has launched a new project, Arweave AO, a decentralized storage and scalability protocol. The protocol launched the protocol's public witness network, inviting developers and fans to participate and evaluate the protocol.

Arweave founder Sam Williams describes the Arweave AO protocol as “a hyper-parallel computer inside Arweave” that handles parallel executions based on stake-proof calculations.

📢 @ArweaveEco is building something incredible:

Hyper parallel computing in Arweave.

A PoS computation that allows any number of processes to execute in parallel.

Oh, and it offers temporary storage.

All on Arweave.

Testnet: Live.

Join us: 2/27.@aoTheComputer. pic.twitter.com/9he989YvHx

— 🐘🔗 sam.arweave.dev (@samecwilliams) February 12, 2024

According to Arwave co-founder Sam Williams, the idea for AO came from the team's exploration of social media and AI applications on the blockchain stack, which required a higher transaction volume than Arwave can currently support.

For context, Arwave has hit an 18-month high for native AR with more than 3.2 billion transactions to date, with a market cap of more than $1 billion last week. The token is trading at $16.13 per CoinGecko data at the time of writing.

The total data generated so far from more than 192,000 addresses is estimated at 89.7 million gigabytes (79.69 pebibytes).

After architecture re-evaluation and internal testing, the AO testnet is deployed on more than 220 machines worldwide, with several projects under development.

Arweave AO's primary design goal is maximizing scalability through a modular system architecture that enables parallel transaction processing. The network is powered by a custom operating system called AOS, which is compatible with the Lua programming language, aiming to facilitate many decentralized applications. Arweave AO uses advanced data warehousing capabilities to handle massive data sets such as AI modeling and LMM (large linguistic models).

According to the project description, it is fully compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine. It also supports blockchain protocols that use the WebAssembly binary instruction format for smart contracts.

The current phase of the testnet is focused on evaluating the Gateway Address Register (GAR) and the Monitoring Incentive Protocol (OIP), two key mechanisms to ensure that the network can scale while maintaining security.

The GAR serves as a catalog for all gateway operators participating in the network, while the OIP maintains and improves the functionality of the gateways on the network. The incentive program provides IO tokens to operators who provide secure gateways, contributing to a decentralized ecosystem for its users and developers.

Prospective participants are encouraged to prepare and test their own entries Testnet. This hands-on test will gather key insights into Arweave AO's capabilities before the mainnet launch later this year.

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