Parsec Weekly #80
The Hyper Parallel Computer
The Hyper Parallel Computer
Arweave has been around for quite some time, since 2017 they have been working on decentralised storage; storing files permanently across a distributed network of computers.
While this continues to be the vision for Arweave itself, the team behind Arweave are endeavouring to build a next generation L1. On February 13th they announced AO , also known as “the hyper parallel computer”.
Without getting too technical, AO is a parallelised chain which seeks to achieve web 2-like scalability while maintaining the trust minimisation one would expect from a distributed system. Some commentators suggest that the design will allow for better results than current next gen L1s like Solana / Aptos / Sui and will offer similar performance to Web 2 architectures. If you want to deep dive into the technicals, I’ll leave the whitepaper here for you.
AO will be able to read and write data from Arweave itself according to this schema from the whitepaper:
In fact, since AO launched on testnet, data stored on Arweave has almost doubled on a weekly basis.
AO and Arweave’s combination of compute and storage could usher in some interesting use cases such as running LLMs in a decentralised manner which hasn’t previously been possible. Speaking of AI usecases, we are already seeing Autonomous bots being deployed on testnet:
The AO token will be used to secure message passing on the network and is being distributed 100% to the community. AO follows Bitcoin’s economic model in some respects with a halving mechanic baked into the distribution curve:
33.3% of AO tokens are being minted to AR holders and 66.6% is minted for bridging assets into AO, these AO tokens will remain locked until ~15% of the supply has been minted which will occur on approximately Feb 8th, 2025. As AO is on testnet, currently this just looks like stETH sitting in an Ethereum Mainnet contract (a form of “pre-bridge”).
This distribution mechanism has been quite the hit so far with 174k stETH or almost $600m depositing to earn AO:
Just a couple of weeks ago we discussed the failings of the standard low float high FDV token launch paradigm so it is refreshing to see the unique approach which AO are taking to distribute their token (full AO economic paper).
We’re excited to see how the hyper parallel computer develops and what AI-related use cases developers come up with.
Stay up to date with stETH deposits to the Pre Bridge contract on parsec: https://parsec.fi/eth/address/0xfe08d40eee53d64936d3128838867c867602665c#transactions