Trust Without Trusting

The word "trustless" in crypto often gets misunderstood. It does not mean the system is untrustworthy. It means you do not need to trust any single entity for the system to work correctly. The protocol enforces the rules, not a company or committee.

Arweave takes this principle and applies it to data storage. No DAO votes on what gets stored. No foundation decides which gateways serve your content. No single node operator can make your data disappear.

How Nodes Work

Anyone can run an Arweave mining node. Miners choose which data they want to store on their own hardware. The more data a miner stores, the more mining rewards they can earn through Arweave's Succinct Proof of Random Access (SPoRA) mechanism.

This creates a natural incentive: miners compete to store as much data as possible because storing more data increases their chance of earning block rewards. No central coordinator assigns data to specific nodes. The economic incentive alone ensures high replication across the network.

The Gateway Layer

Gateways are the bridge between the Arweave network and regular web browsers. When you access content stored on Arweave, you do it through a gateway URL:

https://arweave.net/TRANSACTION_ID

Over 500 gateways currently serve Arweave data. If one gateway is slow, blocked in your region, or goes offline, you simply use another. The data itself is on the blockweave; gateways just serve it.

This architecture makes censorship extremely difficult. To block access to a piece of Arweave data, you would need to take down every gateway worldwide. Since anyone can run a gateway, this is practically impossible.

Real-World Censorship Resistance

This is not theoretical. When Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper was forced to shut down under China's National Security Law, thousands of articles were permanently archived on Arweave. The Chinese government can pressure hosting providers, seize domains, and block websites within its borders. It cannot delete data from Arweave.

U.S. Senator Pat Toomey cited this case in a Senate Banking Committee hearing, noting that Arweave "makes it impossible for the Chinese government to destroy Apple Daily's work."

Similarly, over 6 million pieces of data documenting the Russia-Ukraine conflict have been archived on Arweave. Bloomberg covered this as an example of how permanent storage can preserve evidence that governments might want to suppress.

No Single Point of Failure

Traditional web infrastructure is surprisingly fragile:

• A CrowdStrike update crashed 8.5 million Windows systems in July 2024
• A Cloudflare failure took down X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and Uber simultaneously in November 2024
• AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud together control roughly two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure

Arweave has no equivalent vulnerability. There is no single update that can break the network, no single provider whose failure brings everything offline, no single point of administrative control.

Protocol-Governed, Not Entity-Governed

Arweave's content moderation approach is different from centralized platforms. The protocol itself does not filter content. Individual gateways can choose what they serve, just as individual miners can choose what they store. But the underlying data layer is neutral.

This means the system's guarantees come from cryptography and economics, not from trusting a company to do the right thing. The data is on the blockweave. It stays there regardless of what any single actor decides.