It was around early 2020 when the Arweave team had a big idea that its data storage platform could underpin a highly scalable blockchain network. Yet at the time, it didn’t know exactly how to make that happen.

Cut to 2023 when the team was focused on using Arweave for a social media network. While working on plans for using tokens to represent ownership of content, it realized that a highly scalable network was needed to support a marketplace for such tokens. Then it decided to have a second go.

“So then we were like, okay, let's dust off those plans, can we finish that? Can we get it into a place where it works?” said Arweave founder Sam Williams. “And then we realized, yes, we could — and we just started building.”

Around a month ago, the team created an internal testnet for what it …