Prepare for Warp speed - RedStone blog

Introducing Warp: a new implementation of data-driven smart contracts built on top of the Arweave network. Read below about why we chose Arweave, and what features it allowed us to build on top of the existing SmartWeave protocol.

Hello world, this is Arweave

Arweave is still rather humble in the blockchain tooling market although it has every chance to become a solution to the blockchain scalability issue. Wait, the what?

Yes, blockchain protocols offer decentralized privacy and security like never seen before. But if we project the costs of using these benefits on the amount of data generated daily by our interactions with appliances, web interfaces, and each other — we soon realize how picky we would have to become in order to store even a picture or send a charity donation with this technology. 1GB of storage costs at least $1M on Ethereum, and at least $500k on Solana — it is just too expensive.

Arweave comes to the rescue, with mind blowing $5 per 1GB storage (as of June 2022).

It’s more than storage, though. The real promise is its ability to add logic on top of the already highly cost-efficient Arweave network. This has resulted in an impressive suite of utilities and apps in the Arweave ecosystem.

And then there’s SmartWeave — Arweave’s own protocol, which goes way beyond storage.

Reasons to love SmartWeave

Enables real data ownership through NFTs, providing data integrity
Introduces PST (Profit Sharing Token) — reliable tool for community incentivization
Allows the transfer of assets within exchanges
Decouples storage from computation and advances lazy evaluation, saving a ton on process efficiency

We’ve started the journey with this stack while building the RedStone Oracle protocol for on-chain data streams — the Arweave storage allows efficient persistence of large data volumes, and SmartWeave offers data integrity, which is crucial for our mission to power the DeFi with real-world data. Therefore, a smart-contract solution natively built on top of Arweave seemed to be a perfect match.

We have had some issues with low performance, unclear base protocol definition and implementation that are all difficult to unit test. Additionally, there were chunks of duplicate code that made the protocol hard to maintain.

We wanted to upgrade the developer experience not just for ourselves, but also for the entire SmartWeave community. That’s how Warp came to be.

Warp TL;DR

Warp is a major expansion of Arweave’s SmartWeave protocol. It enables scalable and feature-rich smart contract applications for Arweave builders and creators, and ultimately also for the whole DeFi ecosystem.

Ready for Warp speed? Just grab our SDK and see how easy it is to make cross-contract calls, bundle interactions, deploy contracts, and generate on-chain verifiable randomness with Warp stack.

If you are in the mood for a detailed examination, let’s take a closer look 👀.

Warp 101

SDK solves the SmartWeave problem of inefficient lazy-evaluation. It is also secure and leverages WASM to guarantee deterministic execution within a sandboxed environment.
Transactions are processed in seconds instead of minutes, all thanks to these two optimizations:
Inputs and “fast finality” — Sequencer sorts the transactions while Bundlr packs them.
Outputs are indexed for fast retrieval, with Gateway optimizing data fetching from base storage layer.
Dedicated testing network allows you to unit-test your dApp without setting complicated test environments.
SonAR brings developer-friendly monitoring experience.

Bonus: An array of project templates help scaffold your next smart contract project instead of building from scratch.

How does it work under the hood?

Okay, so what exactly will happen when you process a transaction with Warp?

The sequencer sorts SmartWeave interactions, compares them by the timestamp and the current Arweave network block height. It is then salted with the sequencer’s key.
Interactions are packed by Bundlr which guarantees transaction finality and complete data upload reliability.
Transactions are stored on Arweave, so they are available for querying.
Fast and reliable interaction loading enables lazy-evaluation on SmartWeave. Warp’s gateway is protected against forks and corrupted transactions, so it can guarantee reliable loading of transactions.
Transactions may be evaluated either through Warp’s SDK, or delegated to a distributed execution network (DEN).

Who would enjoy using Warp?

Enthusiasts of decentralized storage paradigms looking for the best effort/value ratio in tools.
Builders of dApps that want (or need) to scale, or already handle loads of transactions.
Anyone traumatized after dealing with sequencers that in theory can do everything, but in practice are painfully slow.
Commander Data working on personal projects between interstellar missions
Pretty much any developer building a pet-project within the Arweave ecosystem.
Web3 & DeFi developers looking to create solutions possible only on Arweave (due to high gas prices with other protocols).

What now?

If you’re already using smartweave.js SDK and would like to smoothly migrate to Warp SDK — check out the migration guide.