Sam Williams, Arweave - Building for the Future of Decentralized Storage and Compute (#57)
June 12, 2025 | 01:06:22 | Episode 57
In this episode of the DePINed Podcast, host Tom Trowbridge talks with Sam Williams, co-founder of Arweave. Preserving newspaper archives, building a decentralized operating system, Sam has spent the past decade on a mission: to make the internet forget less. In a world of ephemerality, censorship, and algorithmic decay, Arweave offers something radically different — permanent storage. And now, with Arweave, it’s taking on decentralized compute at scale.
The Origin Story: A Mission to Remember
Arweave was born in 2017 from a simple idea: what if the web had a memory? What if vital datacould live on-chain, forever accessible, immutable, and censorship-resistant?
That idea has grown into a decentralized data layer with more than 15 billion pieces of content stored. Arweave has become the archive for the permaweb — powering everything from Hong Kong’s Apple Daily backup to the storage of Solana NFT metadata and public code repositories
How It Works: Pay Once, Store Forever Arweave flips the traditional storage model. Instead of recurring fees, users pay a one-time upfront cost that funds perpetual data storage through an endowment model. Up to 95% of that payment is set aside to continuously incentivize storage providers.
This model enables "permanent storage" without centralized control, while maintaining economic sustainability: an approach that sets Arweave apart from both cloud providers and Web3 competitors
AO: The Next Layer — Decentralized Compute If Arweave is the hard drive of the decentralized internet, AO is the CPU. Announced earlier this year, AO is a massively parallel compute layer built on top of Arweave’s storage infrastructure.
Rather than traditional smart contracts, AO leverages "actors": independent processes that can run simultaneously, communicate, and scale infinitely. These actors store their state on Arweave and can interact with traditional APIs, external data, and each other. It’s like running cloud-native apps in a permissionless environment with no servers.
Why AO Matters
AO unlocks new types of applications that require parallelism, scale, and resilience. Social networks, AI inference engines, and open financial agents can now run on infrastructure that’s secure, transparent, and decentralized by default. With 60% of Arweave’s current usage driven by AO, the new compute layer is already reshaping the network.
Sam believes this is the next evolution of DePIN - enabling global-scale, open compute on top of it
The Bigger Picture: Data Sovereignty and Truth
In an era of deepfakes, manipulated news, and information decay, Arweave stands for the opposite. It’s about verifiability, transparency, and ensuring the world doesn’t lose its memory. Sam sees Arweave as a counterforce to algorithmic forgetfulness and centralized control over data.
Whether it’s archiving dissident journalism or providing a backbone for AI transparency, Arweave is an infrastructure for a freer digital future.
Looking Ahead
With AO gaining traction, Arweave is positioning itself as the full stack for a decentralized web: permanent storage + scalable compute. The vision is to become the underlying layer for all applications that require resilience, trust and longevity.
About DePINed Podcast
DePINed is a podcast exploring the frontier of decentralized physical infrastructure, hosted by Tom Trowbridge, co-founder of Fluence. Each episode features in-depth conversations with founders, builders, and investors who are shaping the future of real-world Web3 networks.
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