ao (@aoTheComputer): Introducing Permaweb Names

Introducing Permaweb Names A unified, AO-powered names protocol for the permaweb. The Arweave community has a (remarkably) long history of name systems. Arweave is an open protocol including its name, which people are free to use as they like. At Forward Research, our position has always been that because the name ‘Arweave’ is publicly shared, we should encourage the use of its ‘namespace’ – claims to associate another name with the umbrella of ‘Arweave’ – should perform the maximal public good that can be afforded with this right. We have always thought that the most sensible public good that could likely be afforded with this right is the servicing of free (as in beer) gateways and data access for the permaweb: A flywheel whereby users who appreciate their data having easily rememberable names can purchase names, with the fees then being used to subsidize wide access to the permaweb. If people find increased value in associating with the name ‘Arweave’, then they are willing to pay more for their names – thus increasing the accessibility of those names via improvements in the bandwidth that they fund. In 2022 we backed a team in the ecosystem to pursue this end. Unfortunately, this team did not end up building truly trustless gateways that offer widespread verified access to all of the network’s content. Subsequently, it has not been possible to direct the traffic from arweave.net straight to their gateways, as was initially planned, due to safety risks – without real data verification, invalid responses could be passed to users without detection. As you can read in earlier articles on this blog, to solve this problem we recently launched a network of fully verifiable, cacheless staked community nodes to take over running arweave.net and to provide a truly trustless entrypoint to the permaweb. Given that the original team we backed to build the gateways and name service have recently announced their intention to rescind use of the Arweave name and to move to an off-permaweb hosting solution, today we are announcing permaweb domains: Data and address naming for the permaweb as a public good. A unified permaweb namespace The permaweb has been host to several different naming systems over the years. True to spirit, these records are all enshrined on the weave and are being pulled together into a coherent namespace that will form the initial ownership set for Permaweb Names. Permaweb Names will consolidate the entire legacy namespace of Arweave’s namespaces: all current ArNS (the Arweave-NS form) names -- temporary or permanent, ANS names, as well as ArProfile (including Metaweave’s ‘version 3’, as well as the v2 and original variants) -- are being seeded permanently into the genesis of Permaweb Names. In cases where a name exists on multiple legacy systems, the precedence order used is as follows: ArNS (current name holder’s address) ANS (current name holder’s address) ArProfile v3 ArProfile v2 ArProfile v1 The names <> gateways loop Human-readable names and public gateways are two halves of the same system: names bring users to the permaweb, and gateways make the permaweb reachable. The original vision for names on the permaweb was always part of a funding loop to fuel free public access to gateways. Wider access => more desirable names => more valuable names => wider access. With the launch of the Network Availability Staking alpha (NASA), an incentivization layer for community-run, decentralized and verifiable gateway operation is live and ready to complete this loop. With the launch of Permaweb Names, NASA and other decentralized permaweb infrastructure initiatives will now be funded by a permaweb-native name protocol. Because the new AO-Core based gateway implementation is drastically cheaper to run, name sales alone are now a viable funding mechanism for gateway operators for the first time. To be clear: 100% of Permaweb Name sale revenue will be routed back into the infrastructure that serves the permaweb to its userbase, via smart contract. Names will be sold in AO via an AO mainnet process, settling its state to Arweave. Names pay for open access to the full permaweb via gateways, gateways serve purchased names. AO-Core and Permaweb Naming Building name resolvers on HyperBEAM gives us a different set of primitives to previous systems. At its base, HyperBEAM resolves names through the imaginatively titled ~name@1.0 device. Under the surface, though, its mechanics are a little more surprising: Instead of mandating any specific name resolution system, it allows node operators to specify a ‘stack’ of resolvers to try in turn – each taking precedence over the others. Last month we started experimenting with new forms of non-name immutable Arweave data references, like weave offsets, which use Arweave’s inherent unique ordering to give every piece of data its own short numeric address. These numeric references are particularly interesting because every single piece of data gets one by default. No name purchases, no issuer. Just the Arweave network itself. Now that naming is open to all kinds of AO-Core executions, another area we are excited to explore is bringing real permanence to even temporarily assigned names: The ability to rewind names back to previous versions to see the prior transaction ID the name pointed to, at any given moment. This is a component of the original design for Arweave names that was not implemented in practice. The permaweb is about permanence, and this seems like a perfect way to offer a decentralized web with memory – an internet archive – built-in. This applies to websites, app manifests, scheduler addresses, and anything else you can store on the permaweb, providing a way to intuitively surface full version histories for any named data. All resolution through the ~name@1.0 device is ultimately at node operator’s discretion: The precedence ordering that they choose dictates the data the node serves for a name. That means that any gateway operator can permissionlessly experiment with any kind of new and interesting naming system that they can imagine, letting the market decide which gains true longevity. Let a thousand flowers blossom. The Permweb Names Rollout Until just an hour before the prior team’s public announcement of their refocus outside of Arweave names we had continued to encourage them on a mission to make their stack decentralized and verifiable (rather than operating as an unverified proxy to the servers behind arweave.net behind the scenes). While we respect their decision and wish them well for the future, this has provided just a two week window in which to organize a fully decentralized replacement. As a consequence, Permaweb Names will roll out in stages – the first of which starts today, coinciding with their phase out of the original Arweave Name System. First, Arweave names will continue to resolve as Permaweb Names on arweave.net and other HyperBEAM-based gateways, without interruption. Every single existing name will continue to resolve to its previously assigned Arweave transaction IDs. In addition to just the ArNS names that permaweb gateways have resolved so far, users of ANS and the other supported schemas that assigned TXIDs for their names will find that they begin to resolve, too. Today, each owner of a Permaweb Name is receiving control of a ~reference@1.0 message, allowing owners to change the data that their names point to. You can update your reference using the new BETA UI on the AO permaweb name. In the coming weeks we will publish a testing version of the new Permaweb Names registration and market systems, allowing new purchases of Permaweb Names to commence. All of the genesis set of names issued today – whether from Ar(weave)NS, ANS, or each version of the ArProfile protocol – is receiving their name in permanent form. There will be no lease to renew or further fees associated with those names in the future. Thank you for supporting the permaweb in its most nascent phase. Onwards Arweave is a network built for permanence. If you built on Arweave, or bought names for data on Arweave, your names will continue to work on Arweave. As the namespace grows over time, we are excited to see it strengthen the incentive for other members of the community to spin up and run their own decentralized, trustless open access gateways on top. Brick by brick, rain or shine. Read this on the Permaweb: https://ao.arweave.net/#/blog/permaweb-names