Arweave is a powerful decentralized storage layer, but relying solely on the base layer infrastructure can make it challenging to navigate. In the network’s early days, Phil Mataras noticed this as an opportunity to improve the user experience, and so began the story of Permanent Data Solutions (PDS), a crack team of builders providing invaluable contributions to permaweb infrastructure and culture. Join us for a deep dive into PDS.
The Origin Story of PDS
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is what first brought Phil’s attention to crypto back in 2017, and after several months of mining, he found his way to Arweave. With a solid background in computer science and enterprise-grade IT support, Phil knew a thing or two about UX and backend systems. He spotted an opportunity to level up Arweave accessibility and started a string of services and solutions that now thrive under the umbrella of Permanent Data Solutions. While Arweave’s usability may seem effortless today, it’s visionaries like Phil who helped bring it up to this level. It’s this kind of foresight that marks him as a true Arweave Architect.
Phil Mataras is an Arweave Architect:
— Only Arweave (@onlyarweave) December 4, 2024
• Built ArDrive, THE permanent file system
• Pioneered gateways to the permaweb
• Jams out with a great guitar collection
🧵 Read on to learn about @vilenarios’ story. pic.twitter.com/1DQz0Pjrqi
Under Phil’s leadership, PDS continues on its path to put permanent storage in the hands of everyone.
Key Innovations
To help achieve widespread adoption of permanent data, the PDS team has released several innovations while growing into a decentralized team of permaweb professionals.
Let’s take a closer look at some of their accomplishments.
ArDrive
Phil’s first contribution to the Arweave ecosystem was also one of its biggest breakthroughs for user experience. Drawing on his background in both blockchain and Web2 IT, he designed a file management interface that was intuitive enough to feel familiar, yet powerful enough to unlock the capabilities of permanent storage. You could call it the “Dropbox for crypto,” but that would be selling it short. ArDrive offers much more.
By default, files uploaded to Arweave are public and unencrypted, an essential design choice to ensure important records remain accessible and verifiable. But permanence is not only for cultural artifacts or legal documents. Business ideas, works in progress, or family photos also deserve the same level of protection, with the added safeguard of privacy. ArDrive addresses this by giving individuals the option to encrypt their files before committing them to Arweave.
On the infrastructure side, PDS extended ArDrive’s usability even further through Turbo, a robust implementation of Arweave’s ANS-104 bundling standard. Turbo provides a full upload pipeline, making it far easier for individuals and developers to store data permanently. It supports payments in both fiat and crypto, introduces “Turbo Credits” tailored for storage, and manages indexing and transmission so files are organized and retrievable. With developer-friendly APIs and SDKs, Turbo irons out complexity and creates a bridge between blockchain infrastructure and practical everyday use.
These thoughtful solutions have attracted major projects looking for permanent storage, including NFT collections across multiple blockchains. A recent high-profile example was RTFKT, whose team turned to ArDrive to preserve their assets during a moment when their data was at risk.
That's a wrap! Animus has been fully decentralized on Arweave, completing the decentralization of all our collections, including CloneX and others, now securely stored on IPFS or Arweave.
— Samuel Cardillo (@CardilloSamuel) April 30, 2025
Deepest gratitude to @ardriveapp on the @ar_io_network team for their generous… pic.twitter.com/QEIOBcpZLd
This illustrates an important point; permanence on Arweave can complement other chains. For instance, an NFT can use Ethereum for payments and ownership while securing the actual media files on Arweave. To make this even more accessible, ArDrive allows free uploads for data under 100 KB. It’s a simple way to try out decentralized storage firsthand by preserving something small but meaningful permanently.
AR.IO
By late 2021, Phil and his team had worked out an idea for a fully decentralized gateway network to offer resilient access to Arweave. At the time, all traffic flowed through a single gateway, arweave.net. While the data storage itself was globally decentralized, access was not.
That realization led to the creation of AR.IO, short for Arweave Input/Output. One of its earliest initiatives was taking over management of arweave.net from Forward Research, ensuring the gateway infrastructure was run by the community it served. Since then, AR.IO has expanded into a vast system of over 600 gateways worldwide, each one offering a different entry point to the same underlying data.
You can explore gateways here: gateways.ar.io/#/gateways, or here: gateways.arweave.net/#/gateways, or here: gateways.ar.anyone.tech/#/gateways, or even here: gateways.arlink.xyz/#/gateways.
The list goes on, but the principle is simple. No matter which gateway you choose, the content is the same. If one gateway goes offline, simply switch to another and pick up right where you left off. With hundreds of options distributed across the globe, AR.IO ensures that access to humanity’s most important data remains fast, resilient, and censorship-resistant. But reliable access is only the beginning. Since launching its mainnet earlier this year, AR.IO has been building toward the first truly permanent cloud network. Their extensive Cloudmap lays out the plan for continuous growth across adoption, accessibility, developer empowerment, infrastructure, economics, and network autonomy.
See for yourself the scale of what they’re building:
Seriously, the AR.IO team moves at such a rapid pace that at times we have to hold back on featuring all of their progress, otherwise Arweave Today might look more like AR.IO Today!
ArNS
As part of their mission to make Arweave more accessible and user-friendly, PDS also plays a key role in the development of the Arweave Name System (ArNS). If you’re familiar with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), ArNS builds on a similar idea but pushes it further.
Like ENS, it allows individuals to replace long wallet addresses with human-readable names by paying a small lease fee, which can be secured for up to five years at a time. Where ArNS stands apart is in offering the option to permabuy a domain, giving individuals a truly permanent identity within the Arweave ecosystem.
Beyond just naming, ArNS is also designed to be programmable. Names can include logic powered by smart contracts, meaning they can trigger integrations, features, and automations, opening the door to dynamic onchain interactions. Another unique feature is the ability to include underscores in names, creating what are called “undernames” and expanding the ways developers and users can structure identities on the permaweb.
If you’re curious to dive deeper into the differences between ArNS and ENS, there’s a detailed breakdown available here: ArNS vs ENS: Decentralizing the Domain Name System. Once you’re ready to secure your name, check out the lease and permabuy procedures here: docs.ar.io/learn/arns.
Wayfinder
PDS introduced Wayfinder, a protocol and suite of tools designed to give users direct access to Arweave data through the ar:// standard. Instead of needing to remember a gateway domain, users can simply type an ar:// link into their browser or application to be routed seamlessly to content stored on Arweave, such as a transaction ID or an ArNS address like ar://ardrive.
Behind the scenes, Wayfinder taps into AR.IO’s registry of gateways to direct the request to the most efficient and reliable entry point available. The result is fast, censorship-resistant access that feels as smooth as browsing the traditional web. For everyday users, there’s a Chrome extension that lets you browse ar:// URLs directly with zero setup. For developers, Wayfinder comes packaged with tools such as a JavaScript library, a React package, and a CLI tool, making it easy to embed Arweave access into any application or service.
Phil gave a detailed overview of Wayfinder’s origins, current progress, and future plans during Arweave Day Berlin earlier this year.
"Most apps hardcode a gateway. That's gateway centralization in disguise." – @vilenarios, Founder of @ar_io_network 🕵️
— ao (@aoTheComputer) July 1, 2025
At Arweave Day Berlin, Phil unveiled Wayfinder, a protocol that solves this hidden risk by enabling trustless, verifiable access across decentralized gateways.… pic.twitter.com/YGuUfFRHhw
Promising Partnerships
Beyond building out core infrastructure, the PDS team has been instrumental in forging partnerships that expand the reach of Arweave and AO Computer into new frontiers. Their collaborations span decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), real-world assets, privacy, and decentralized AI, bringing some of the most forward-thinking projects into alignment with the permaweb.
Here’s a quick rundown of some recent partnerships:
Anyone Protocol: A privacy-focused DePIN enabling anonymous internet access through a decentralized onion routing network powered by community-operated hardware nodes. Anyone Protocol operates an AR.IO gateway and leverages AO for its relay operator dashboard.
Midnight: A privacy-centric blockchain designed for applications that protect sensitive data using zero-knowledge proofs and selective disclosure. By leveraging AR.IO, Midnight ensures its confidential smart contract storage is anchored permanently on Arweave.
Derad Network: A DePIN that incentivizes ADS-B aviation tracking, deploying decentralized ground stations to collect flight data like GPS positions, altitude, and speed. With AR.IO, Derad ensures these records are stored as tamper-proof history on the permaweb, improving transparency and safety in global airspace.
iExec: A decentralized cloud computing marketplace offering confidential computing resources for secure data processing. iExec teamed up with AR.IO to power privacy-first messaging apps on Telegram.
Fluence: A decentralized compute protocol that orchestrates serverless functions across distributed nodes for cost-efficient applications. Fluence integrates AR.IO's infrastructure to combine decentralized compute with permanent Arweave storage.
Inference Labs: A platform for trustless AI verification using zero-knowledge machine learning proofs to audit and validate model outputs onchain. Inference Labs leverages AR.IO and Arweave for the immutable storage of Bittensor AI computations.
Aethir: A decentralized GPU infrastructure providing compute for AI training, inference, and rendering workloads. Aethir recently welcomed AR.IO into its AI Unbundled Alliance to merge GPU resources with permanent Arweave storage.
Fueling the Permanent Cloud
At the heart of the AR.IO Network is its native token $ARIO, the utility engine that powers the Permanent Cloud. $ARIO is used for services like ArNS, incentivizes gateways to keep the permaweb accessible, and enables a wide range of network functions designed to ensure data remains permanent, reliable, and censorship-resistant.
$ARIO’s token economy is structured for long-term stability, with a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, and revenue from services like ArNS domain registrations cycling back into the protocol to fund rewards for operators, delegators, and observers.
AR.IO also happens to be one of the fair launch projects supported by the Permaweb Index, which means you can adjust your delegation preferences to receive a portion of your AO rewards in $ARIO.
You can dive deeper into the tokenomics of $ARIO in this helpful Guide to $ARIO Tokenomics. Of course, this is all for informational purposes and shouldn't be taken for financial advice.
PDS Team Members
Up to now, we've shone the spotlight mostly on Phil Mataras, but PDS would not be what it is without a talented and diverse team.
Take MC Lars, for example, a certified Arweave Architect. He’s been working with PDS for several years, bringing his unique blend of creativity, insight, and flair to marketing initiatives across the ecosystem.
MC Lars is an Arweave Architect:
— Only Arweave (@onlyarweave) February 19, 2025
• Community and Events Strategist at PDS
• Using Arweave to preserve banned books
• The voice behind countless ArDrive videos
🧵 Keep reading to learn about @mclars’ story. pic.twitter.com/407OL5GXsT
Meanwhile, Will Kempster drives ecosystem growth, fostering partnership opportunities while championing Arweave’s creative communities.
On the engineering front, @djwhitt and @dtfiedler provide regular updates across the PDS stack. You’ll also catch them in occasional technical interviews on shows like DevNTell.
Keeping operations smooth is JonnieSparkles, COO of PDS, and the creator of ar://playdead, a platform that celebrates and preserves music permanently.
While these are some of the more visible PDS team members, it’s important to recognize the hard work of others who contribute to making Arweave resilient and accessible. Who knows, there may just be more Arweave Architects in the making.
Community Empowerment
Even with a visionary leader and a talented team, the success of PDS initiatives would not be possible without its engaged and passionate community. This is evident not only in the growing number of gateways in operation but also in the quality and variety of content created by its community. Some members have even risen to the role of AR.IO Ambassador, including @vevivoofficial and @aluisyoanx.
The AR.IO Community Hub offers a great starting point, with links to social accounts and a curated selection of articles and videos from the community: ar.io/community-hub.
If you’d like to get more acquainted with the AR.IO community, dive into their Discord and introduce yourself: discord.com/invite/HGG52EtTc2.
Grants Program
Another way in which the PDS team has been successful in encouraging permaweb involvement is through the $ARIO grants program. Designed to support projects that expand the utility and accessibility of the permaweb, the first round of grants wrapped up recently with a number of successful initiatives already delivered.
The program, including micro grants, open applications, and detailed RFPs, funded a range of efforts, from technical tutorials and starter kits to larger initiatives exploring search, discovery, and developer experience on the permaweb. Among the most notable outcomes were Rewind, a visual explorer of ArNS history (awarded to RandAO), and the ArNS Marketplace, which introduces trustless name trading on Arweave (awarded to BlockyDevs).
The first round of applications proved that even small grants can spark big ideas. As these projects roll out, they set the stage for more permaweb builders to experiment and push the network forward.
Stewards of the Permaweb
PDS stands out not only for the technology they build, but for the philosophy that guides their work. Their approach represents the permaweb at its very best, blending community, culture, and collaboration. Their success stems from stewardship, meaning, and a vision that inspires others to build alongside them.
To follow the progress of PDS, its projects, and the people behind it, keep an eye on their official channels. Finally, you can find out more about AR.IO, ArDrive, and countless other permaweb projects using the interactive Learn Mode on aoDevBot. It has high context of Arweave and AO, while its curated knowledge base is updated regularly to help you go deeper.