GuShiio.com Is the “loss of voice” of Arweave and AO caused by ecological decline or another gem ignored by the market?
Author: Frank, PANews
On February 11, the veteran decentralized storage protocol Arweave launched the centralized computing platform AO and issued an official announcement, stating that the first main-network token minting has been completed and new token minting will be held at 18:20 Eastern Time every day. Unlike Story and Solayer, which were airdropped during the same period, the release of AO did not seem to cause much stir on social media. From a vision perspective, AO is closely related to the hottest AI topics at the moment. As a mature decentralized storage infrastructure, Arweave can provide many assistance on the underlying network.
Low expectations for airdrops lead to low market enthusiasm
The first reason why AO was ignored may be that this token issuance did not bring too many expectations to the market. According to official reports, the total issuance of AO tokens is 21 million, using a halving mechanism similar to Bitcoin. Among the previous reward allocations, 36% were allocated to AR holders, and 64% were incentives for cross-chain asset bridging (such as DAI, stETH). Data on February 12 showed that 3.214 million AO tokens have been minted.
As of February 11, 2025, the circulation of AR is 65.65 million. Based on this ratio, the current distribution ratio of AR to AO is 20.78:1. Exchanges that have launched pre-market trading include LBank and MEXC, but there is a huge gap in pre-market prices between the two exchanges. The pre-market price of LBANK is about US$92, while the price of MEXC is only about US$35, a difference of more than double. However, in terms of trading volume, LBANK’s 24-hour pre-market trading volume was US$1.97 million, which was higher than MEXC’s trading volume. Therefore, the price of LBANK may be more in line with market expectations. Based on the current high pre-market price of US$92, AO’s circulating market value is approximately US$290 million.
According to previous official information, on average, each AR token holder may receive 0.016 AO tokens. Based on a pre-market price of US$92, AR holders will be able to receive each token worth approximately US$14.72 in the past few months. This share has exceeded the value of a single AR. However, if we take into account the decline in AR in the past six months, it has dropped from a peak of US$49.55 in May 2024 to US$9.52 on February 11, a drop of more than 80%. Users holding coins during this period need to expect the AO opening price to rise to around US$500 to make up for the decline.
As of February 11, AR’s total number of currency holding addresses was 211,000. Based on this calculation, each address can be allocated approximately 4.44 AOs, worth US$409 (but this data is only an estimate, and the specific value must comply with airdrop rules). According to current official data, AO’s top 100 addresses hold a total of 2.21 million tokens, accounting for about 70%, and the chips of large households are relatively concentrated. Judging from the overall scale of airdrops, if the pre-market price of US$92 is maintained, the scale can reach US$290 million. If the price is only about US$35, the scale of the airdrop will be as little as US$110 million. Considering the steep decline in AR tokens, it is indeed difficult to arouse market enthusiasm.
Internet activity has indeed improved, and the overall level remains low
In fact, the overall activity of the Arweave network has never been high. Taking February 11 as an example, Arweave had 3366 daily active addresses on that day, but compared with historical data, this data level is actually a period of high activity. Before 2023, its online daily activity will basically remain at around 1000, and the daily activity data will be increased to 2000 in 2024. After entering 2025, perhaps due to AO’s airdrop expectations, daily activity data generally reaches above 3000, with the highest reaching above 5000 a day.
In addition, as a decentralized storage network, the volume of data uploads may be one of the most important indicators of activity. On-chain data shows that since the end of 2023, Arweave’s daily data uploads have continued to grow. The average daily data volume of more than 100 gigabytes has risen to more than 400. Although the highest point is still less than the single-day peak of 2.02TB created in 2022, the overall upload volume does show a steady upward trend.
In terms of network activity, ArDrive is the most active application in the Arweave network. About 90% of the daily data uploads are uploaded by ArDrive. ArDrive is a permanent storage application on the Arweave network that allows users to permanently save their files and be completely uncensored. In 2022, ArDrive completed a US$17.2 million seed round of financing. In addition to ArDrive, another ecological project, Irys, contributed about 10% of the uploads.
In addition, there is a strange data phenomenon in the Arweave ecosystem. Since June 1, 2024, the total number of Arweave addresses has not been added, and has been fixed at the number of 211366. It is unknown whether the user growth of the ecosystem has completely stalled or whether there is a problem with the maintenance of browser data. However, just as AO is lukewarm, no one discusses these details.
AO ecology is still in its very early stages
According to official data, the current TVL of AO Network is approximately US$315 million. Compared with the US$700 million in the test-net phase, there has been a lot of decline. From this point of view, it seems that users are not enthusiastic about AO Network’s subsequent pledge token incentives.
From the perspective of ecological projects, several related ecological projects are still in their early stages of development. For example, AOX, the most important cross-chain bridge in the AO network, announced on February 11 that its transaction volume exceeded US$8 million and TVL exceeded US$3 million. Another ecological project, FusionFi, announced that its settlement amount exceeded US$10 million.
Judging from the situation of social media interactions, the following projects in the AO Ecosystem are already in operation.
Marketverse AI: AI proxy project
StarGrid Battle Tactics: Online Games
Decent.land: EVM virtual machines
AOX: Cross-chain Bridge
FusionFi Protocol：AgentFi
Permaswap：DEX
Astro Labs: Liquidity provider and stablecoin USDA issuance
RedStone Oracles: Oracle Project
Overall, AO Network is still a new generation of products. There is currently no exclusive browser, no official ecological map, and publicity has not clearly announced when AO will open official transactions. Even after a year of test-net phase, judging from the current ecological state, it seems that it is still in a rough state. Therefore, the public may not be able to start with the expectations of AO.
From another perspective, perhaps AO’s innovative concept at the technical level was the main reason for previous market investment expectations. However, looking at the answer sheet submitted by the main online line, it is more like submitting a test sheet with the first half of the paper, but only partially interpreting the issue of the token mechanism. However, its claimed AI potential and core narrative of performance upgrades through permanent storage have not yet yielded practical results. For AO, the key to success lies in whether it can transform the technical narrative into practical applications, rather than relying solely on token incentives.
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