First published 9 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 so a storage fee is not described as a promise the file lasts forever, and so the file is not described as AR. Arweave is its own chain. Sam Williams is the person most associated with it. Mainnet opened on 8 June 2018. AR is the fee for writing data into that chain. The yellow paper created 55 million AR in the genesis block and set 11 million more to be paid out as mining rewards. The ceiling is 66 million. A price times 66 million is the ceiling, not the amount already free to trade.
An upload fee is not handed in full to the miner of that block. Most of it goes into an endowment, which the design releases to miners when ordinary rewards are not enough to pay for keeping data. That is a fund with a rule. It is not a warranty that a file is stored for a century, and it is not a copyright. Paying AR does not make you the owner of what was uploaded. A gateway can also refuse to show a file. The chain and the website you use to read it are different things.
This page will not walk through an upload or a miner. An Arweave address is not an Ethereum address. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Nothing here is an instruction to store a file, to mine, or to buy AR.
