What happens when you give a team of storage-obsessed engineers three weeks to start the new year? Apparently, they build a lot. Here’s our end-of-January brain dump of what we’ve been up to while still recovering from having to take time off.
The Numbers
Our weavevm-exex data protocol has been absolutely devouring transactions on Arweave since January 1st – we are hitting almost 2 million transactions and counting. For the metrics-obsessed among you (we see you), that translates to roughly 4GB of compressed EVM data, or 8GB uncompressed. We’re consistently topping Arweave’s weekly transaction counts according to TheDataOS metrics. Our network’s humming along at 100k data storage transactions daily, which is basically our version of “it’s not much, but it’s honest work.”
The Big One: WeaveVM Bundler Goes Brrrrr
Remember when pushing data to an EVM chain felt like trying to stuff an entire pizza into a mail slot? Not anymore! The 0xbabe1 Bundler protocol just hit v0.1.3 stable with some serious upgrades:
- Bundler upload SDK: post data to a bundling service from the UI stack.
- Bundler gateway: a hosted (and self-hostable) gateway to resolve content from bundles. Works out of the box to render all browser-renderable content.
- Tagged envelopes: Pack up to 2048 bytes of tags in your envelope. Think MIME types, custom protocols, L3 data – basically anything you need to make your data actually useful and findable.
- JS/TS library: Because not everyone wants to write Rust (shocking, we know). Full TypeScript support included, naturally.
- Stable protocol spec: The 0xbabe1 specification is now locked in, so you can build without worrying about the rug being pulled out from under you.
Check the blog post for more information on what you can actually do and get started!
WeaveVM appspace gets started
The new bundler library makes pushing data to WeaveVM super easy, and we’re already seeing dApps use it to store everything from jpegs to PDFs onchain.
Relic – the first consumer app on WeaveVM. Publish photos onchain from your phone. Stores jpegs as EVM calldata in bundled transactions. Smart contracts and data 100% on WeaveVM.
onchain.rs – a simple UI to store stuff onchain, powered by WeaveVM bundles. Walletless, free, and complete with a gateway that can render common browser-renderable file types, making it possible to use for embedding files into pages. Fun fact: images in this blog post are all stored onchain with onchain.rs!
From DevOps Drama to Shipping Code: The Shuttle.dev Collab
We’ve teamed up with Shuttle.dev to show how deploying EVM microservices doesn’t have to be a nightmare. As a team handling 100k daily transactions and securing $1.5B across networks like Metis, Humanode, and Avalanche, we can’t afford to waste time fighting with infrastructure. After one too many rounds with Heroku’s “dependency roulette,” we found Shuttle’s Rust-native approach cuts through the typical DevOps overhead. Now our backend team ships APIs, ETL pipelines, and cron jobs without breaking a sweat.
Want the full story of how we went from “it works on my machine” to actually shipping code? Check out our deep dive on the Shuttle blog where we break down the migration and share some Heroku war stories.
WeaveVM supplies data to blobscan
Alongside Google Cloud and Swarm, WeaveVM is now a blob data supplier for Blobscan, the #1 explorer for EIP-4844 transactions. All blobs from L2s that post to Ethereum are stored permanently on WeaveVM and made available via Blobscan. Long live the blobs!
Archiving the RSS3 Value Sublayer
This month RSS3 joined the ranks of chains that use WeaveVM to store their ledger history, alongside Dymension, Avalanche, Metis, Humanode, GOAT Network and more.
This provides a trustless mirror of RSS3 data with clear provenance, adding transparency to the black box nature of L2s, with new blocks being settled permanently to Arweave as soon as they come in. Read more here.
Under the Hood Updates
The team’s also heads-down on all those critical-but-rarely-celebrated infrastructure tasks:
- ExEx fixes (because bugs don’t fix themselves, unfortunately)
- Actor-model refactoring for Arweave and GCP ExExes (it’s like regular refactoring, but with more buzzwords)
- Precompile fixes (the digital equivalent of changing the oil)
The “Soon™” Section
Because every update needs some teasers, here’s what’s cooking:
- AI agents coming to WeaveVM
- Cross-chain infrastructure updates for WeaveVM Alphanet v3 (keep an eye on our announcements this month)
- A new EVM L1 that’s going to use WeaveVM for data storage and high-throughput DA (this is technically an announcement of an announcement, but we promise it’s worth the wait)
The Receipts
For those keeping track at home, all of this activity has resulted in a steady 100k daily data storage transactions for a monthly total of 4.7m.
Want to see what we were up to before this caffeine-fueled coding spree? Check out our 2024 recap. Or better yet, join us in Discord where you can watch our engineers debate tab vs. spaces in real-time.
P.S. This update was written by engineers, for engineers. Any accidental clarity or readability is purely coincidental.
Found a typo? Want to tell us our documentation could be better? Strong opinions about Rust? Our Discord and Telegram is always open, and our GitHub issues are surprisingly well-maintained for a blockchain project.