For rollups — especially rollups with decentralized sequencers — data permanency and transparency is essential. According to L2Beat, some of the most critical vulnerabilities L2s face relate to the verifiability of data: “Funds can be lost if the external data becomes unavailable”.
Permanent storage ensures data is always available, eliminating the risk of losing data (and funds) if off-chain solutions fail. And, for new nodes joining the network, a public copy of ledger history with clear provenance means reduces trust assumptions when syncing from genesis.
That’s why Metis chose to post a full live copy of the ledger to WeaveVM, with new blocks being settled permanently to Arweave as soon as they come in.
WeaveVM is a sovereign EVM network built towards the goal of solving the EVM storage dilemma with Arweave. It gives the coming generation of high-performance chains a place to settle and store onchain data, without worrying about cost, availability, or permanence.
WeaveVM storage is a fraction of the cost of storing data on Ethereum, and even cheaper than L2 calldata. That’s because it uses Arweave under the hood. Arweave is a purpose-built permanent storage chain, with a network size of 300 petabytes spread across hundreds of miners. WeaveVM provides a native EVM interface for chains to hook into Arweave storage at the ledger, DA, and smart contract level.
The WeaveVM archiver
The Metis integration with WeaveVM uses the WeaveVM Archiver - an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) archive pipeline specifically designed for EVM networks. It offers the simplest way to interface with WeaveVM’s permanent data feature without rollup smart contract redeployments or sequencer changes.
By integrating the WeaveVM Archiver, chains can leverage WeaveVM’s permanent data storage without changes to their core architecture.
This provides a straightforward interface to WeaveVM storage, eliminating the need for disruptive smart contract redeployments or changes to sequencers.
Metis is able to keep its current architecture for data settlement and DA, reducing the need for extensive codebase modifications while benefiting from enhanced data availability.
WeaveVM acts as a permanent, incentivized archival node that can be used for new network participants as a checkpoint.
15,000 METIS voted for WeaveVM
On September 12th 2024, Metis Community Ecosystem Governance (CEG) voted 15,000 METIS tokens in favor of using WeaveVM storage. An archiver is running at this address posting Metis data to Arweave as it comes in. Information on the archiver’s status is available here.
During the proposal’s voting period, Decent Land Labs co-founder Benjamin spoke with Cobi, representing Metis Governance, about the significance of the integration.
— cobi.bean🌿 (@L2cobi) September 10, 2024
An abridged version of the transcript is below!
Cobi: So if you could tell us a little bit about WeaveVM, what they do, and kind of some practical use cases. Maybe like I’m a crypto newbie. If you. If you could make it as newbie friendly as possible.
Benjamin: Sure. Okay. Normally I’m not used to dumbing it down all that much, but I mean, I would say that, like, a key characteristic of blockchains is that they’re immutable. Right. Crypto solves that single source of truth problem, but usually what they focus on is consensus and execution, which are the really strongly decentralized parts of the stack.
Blockchains typically put a lot of emphasis on what’s happening in the here and now, but give little regard actually to where all that on chain data lives after it’s settled. So it brings up questions like how does a new node know how to sync the full state of the blockchain from Genesis? Or how can dApps query data from many, many blocks ago? Or how can we be sure that data stored onchain will be available in the far future? This is a web two problem. It’s like you go and you find 404s on Wikipedia. When you’re looking through the sources, there are broken links everywhere. Because permanence and immutability are not a characteristic of web2, but they should be for web3.
We’re coming into WeaveVM with the perspective that, right now on EVM chains, storage is really expensive. It’s generally the very last thing that the blockchains are optimizing for. And that gets in the way of a lot. Like if you’re building an L2, like Metis, you want that data to be available and trustlessly verifiable and there for all of eternity. If you’re building a consumer app onchain, you want to be able to upload large videos and have those available for eternity. I feel like if we’re not addressing the storage problem associated with EVM, we’re not really building decentralized apps. So that’s what WeaveVM is focused on.
The way that I would describe it is it’s a high throughput EVM network focused on DA and storage. Uniquely, it’s the first EVM network to use Arweave as its storage layer, and that bypasses the limits that EVM chains typically see around storage being really expensive, hard to verify, unincentivized. Yeah, so that’s a high level, and it’s kind of the problem space that we’re sitting in, hopefully from a crypto noob perspective.
Cobi: No, that was perfect. And thanks for the little like, background too. Setting the stage for what you guys do. That is perfect. So just checking for understanding. So WeaveVM is a chain in itself, focusing on data availability and storage. Is that correct?
Benjamin: Correct.
Cobi: Okay, perfect. So with WeaveVM being its own chain, what kind of value do you guys see bringing to Metis? And maybe, you know, maybe talk to some of the people in the audience and myself? Really, my first thought is like, oh, there, it’s not a protocol itself or just a project. They’re their own chain. So how can they help Metis if they’re their own separate chain?
Benjamin: Yeah, sure. So one of the, one of the things that we spoke kind of about with somebody from the Metis team was like, how can Metis, with its decentralized sequencer model, make it so that any node joining any new network participant can come in and grab all of the state that has so far happened on Metis and sync their node up to date and join the network with that full history? Now it’s possible in its current state, but unless that data is on chain, fully on chain, on a chain, like Arweave via WeaveVM, you actually have to trust somebody to sync your validator and join the network. So Metis is one of the, it may be the first, L2 that has successfully launched a decentralized sequencer?
Cobi:You got it right.
Benjamin: So you’re coming into these sort of issues as like, okay, the sequencer itself is decentralized, but the places that people are getting that data from in order to join the network with one of these decentralized sequencer nodes is not decentralized. You’d have to trust somebody in order to get that data. The way that the integration technically works is that we point the Metis RPC at WeaveVM and any new block or transaction that comes into Metis gets fed into WeaveVM and then settled on Arweave. It’s a way for any EVM chain to push its data permanently onto a dedicated permanent storage chain. So that’s the specific Metis benefit.
Actually, Metis is a particularly good fit for this because of the decentralized sequencer part. But really, any EVM chain will find that it becomes sort of burdened with old state in time. And that’s actually what EIP 4444 is seeking to alleviate. And the way that Ethereum L1 is doing that is just by making it so that validators must delete data after time, which is, you know, it then begs the question of, like, okay, where is all of this historical data going to go? Typically that’s into archival nodes.
There are really only a handful of Ethereum archival nodes that have the whole state and that are accessible. It’s also a very common practice for companies to monetize access to that data. So on the storage side of things, unless you have something like Arweave, which is the only permanent storage chain, then you sort of are, you know, you’re getting towards the fringes, and that’s where it’s actually more centralized and less accordances have been taken to avoid centralization.
Cobi: Amazing. Amazing. And so, yeah, like, like you said, I think that. And then, Prince, I’ll pass the mic to you right after this. But, yeah, like, the fact that we, you know, or that Metis itself, you know, the way that it’s built and the people here philosophically, truly believe in decentralization as one of the core values of the network. I don’t want to speak for everybody, but I feel like that is true. And, you know, that’s one of the reasons that I’ve decided to plant my flag here. Right? So, yeah, this is great. You know, not having to rely on centralized storage and centralized servers and stuff like that is a great addition to the network as well. Prince, all you, buddy.
Prince: Yes, thank you. Thank you, Coby. Thank you, Benjamin. Great conversation. One major question here. In all of this, I’m pretty sure before you guys thought on board, your BD team or your dev team, probably considered Metis already uses an off chain storage – Memo Labs. So all of this, I’m just trying to understand where Memo Labs comes in all of this, and is it something that has to work together? So, like, considering these developments and Metis’ plan to move to EigenDA, and currently using Memo Labs. So how does it compete in this scenario?
Benjamin: Oh yeah, that’s a good question, a good distinction to make. The way that I look at it, there’s a few different depths of integration that you can do with WeaveVM. This one here is the simplest. Essentially, it has no other dependencies on it whatsoever. All that is required is to point your RPC at WeaveVM that will then automatically start archiving the ledger. What that results in is basically a decentralized archival node that is guaranteed by Arweave storage. As I understand what Memo is currently doing, it’s doing DA, and you’re looking at replacing that with EigenDA. You can continue using that architecture for data settlement and DA. You don’t actually need to modify the Metis code base whatsoever, but you have an extra layer of guarantees around that data permanence. Since it is posted to Arweave, things like EigenDA, I believe the data persists for 14 days and then is wiped. But you will always have a permanent copy on Arweave.
We’re actually exploring an integration with EigenDA, where if you use Eigen for DA, then you get a second copy of that data permanently hosted on Arweave as well, by default. I guess there will be some more news on that, hopefully soon. But yeah, the way that we’re looking at it is that this is ledger archiving. This is the historical state, all of the blocks so far, whereas EigenDA is handling the data between fraud proof windows rather than being concerned with the history that’s over two weeks old.
Cobi: Benjamin, let’s humanize this a little bit. Let’s talk about your personal background. Kind of like what brought you here, you know, um, you all the way back from what got you into crypto. What happened to make you decide to go from just an investor or a trader to a builder? Maybe you’re a web2 developer as well. Could you just maybe talk about your personal background or some of your team’s background?
Benjamin: Sure. Yeah. I got into the space around 2018, 2019. At the time I was working in a B2B SaaS job. My personal background is basically that I’ve been head of marketing and head of growth at a couple of Silicon Valley SaaS startups over the years, actually kind of straight out of university. That’s all I did for several years – working in the SaaS world. The job that I left for, the job that I left to start a startup was head of growth at Chameleon. That’s a SaaS platform focused on UX improvements for web2 apps. But then on the side from that, I was working on a print magazine that dealt with digital culture.
I was writing a piece on archiving lost media and ended up reaching out to the founder of Arweave, Sam, about how Arweave could be a solution to that. It was very much on my mind at the time because I was on a sort of personal mission to collect and archive rare Latvian films. I was living in Latvia at the time and realizing that so much was not available online and everything was sort of VHS tapes in the back of, you know, your grandparents wardrobe and things like this hidden in personal collections. And so I was sort of really interested about preserving digital culture and came across crypto that way. Arweave is a way to permanently preserve information. And so it was kind of symbiotic to have discovered it at that time.
I pretty quickly joined the first Arweave hackathon, met my co-founder, got some pre-seed funding, and quit my day job pretty soon afterwards. The original Decent Land mission was to build social using Arweave. We pretty quickly realized that Arweave was so young at the time, it didn’t really have infrastructure for computation, you know, no kind of smart contract platform. Everything was a little bit janky in the early days, and so in 2022 we landed on building infrastructure instead. And I think that when you’re building infrastructure, it’s very common that all roads lead to EVM. When you’re trying to connect a useful niche tool to where the actual value exchange is happening, you’re probably going to end up building something EVM related. And so this is how we got into building WeaveVM and Decent Land Labs. But, yeah, I mean, that’s my personal journey over the past five or so years.
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