Arweave was established by Sam Williams and William Jones, both Ph.D. candidates at the University of Kent. Williams entered the project with expertise in decentralized and distributed systems, having created an operating system named HydrOS as part of his academic endeavors. Jones, on the other hand, concentrated on graph theory and neural networking. Williams left graduate school to concentrate on the company, while Jones departed from the project in mid-2018 to complete his Ph.D. Williams reportedly conceived the idea during a mountain hike in Scotland and later shared the concept with Jones, with whom he developed the technical aspects. After the launch of Arweave, Williams became an advisor to Minespider, a company offering blockchain-based supply chain tracking for the raw materials industry, and has served as a mentor for the Techstars accelerator program. While Arweave initially started with centralized leadership, it implemented a decentralized autonomous organization in January 2020, composed of key community members, to drive the development and growth of the network and its ecosystem.

According to Arweave's yellow paper, the project aims to ensure the "collective ability to store and share information between individuals and across time to new generations." To achieve this objective, its flagship permaweb is constructed on Arweave's "blockweave," a variation of blockchain technology where each block is linked not only to the immediate preceding one but also to a random preceding block. Arweave claims this approach incentivizes miners to store more data, as they need to access random previous blocks to add new ones and earn rewards. Arweave is dedicated to fostering a sustainable ecosystem around its network. In June 2020, it introduced "profit sharing tokens," enabling developers to receive dividends from the network transaction fees generated by their applications. Additionally, Arweave hosts incubators to support the development of permaweb-based applications. The project also collaborates with startups through its "Boost" program, providing free storage and access to the Arweave team and industry investors. In March 2020, Arweave announced securing $8.3 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. This funding came after a previous investment in November 2019, which also included Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, alongside Multicoin Capital.

According to its yellow paper, Arweave has a maximum token supply of 66 million AR. When the blockweave's genesis block was created in June 2018, 55 million AR were minted, with an additional 11 million set to be gradually introduced as block rewards. In August 2017, Arweave conducted a token pre-sale, selling 10.8% of the initially generated token supply. This was followed by two public sales in May 2018 and June 2018, where 7.1% and 1.1% of the supply were sold, respectively. The company allocated 19.5% for a private sale, 2.9% for project advisors, 13% for the team (subject to a five-year lock-up, with 20% released per year), 19.1% for ecosystem development, and 26.5% for future project use (also subject to a five-year lock-up, with 20% released per year).

The Arweave network is founded on a modified version of blockchain technology referred to as "blockweave," implementing a "proof-of-access" (PoA) consensus algorithm—a variant of the proof-of-work mechanism. In PoA, each new block is not only connected to its immediate predecessor but also linked to a randomly selected previous block, with both blocks being hashed to create the new one. This approach allows miners to be incentivized to store additional data, as they must demonstrate access to previous blocks required for mining new ones, without the need to store the entire blockchain. Arweave employs the RandomX mining protocol, which underwent a successful audit by four cybersecurity firms—Trail of Bits, Kudelski Security, X41 D-Sec, and QuarksLab—in August 2019. The project announced plans to adopt a new mining algorithm, SPoRA, starting in early 2021. This algorithm had already been audited by the NCC Group as of December 2020. For updated information and further details, refer to Eulerpool.

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