At DePIN Day Singapore, Phil Mataras, co-founder of AR.IO Network, took the stage to talk about what he calls a permanent cloud — an infrastructure layer designed to make decentralized data truly permanent, verifiable, and accessible at scale.
A musician at heart and a builder by trade, Mataras left his enterprise architecture career in 2020 to build ArDrive, a simple interface for uploading data to the Arweave network. But as more developers began looking for reliable decentralized storage, he saw a broader opportunity: to create a cloud-like layer on top of Arweave that developers could actually build on. That became AR.IO — “a permanent cloud network.”
Storage and a full cloud stack
As Mataras explained, Arweave functions like “Bitcoin for data” — a blockchain built for one purpose: to store information forever. Users pay once, and their data is archived indefinitely. But while Arweave solved the permanence problem, it didn’t yet offer the cloud-level capabilities developers need to build applications.
AR.IO fills that gap. It’s a distributed suite of services for reading, writing, caching, and routing data, built directly on top of Arweave and its smart-contract compute layer, AO. The result is a system that looks and behaves like AWS — but without a single point of control.
The AR.IO network includes:
- Gateways — 680+ active nodes serving and verifying data around the world.
- Turbo, a high-speed upload and payment service accepting multiple currencies (from credit cards to SOL, ETH, and the RIO token).
- Wayfinder, a load-balancing and data-verification protocol that ensures information remains reachable even if individual nodes go offline.
- ArNS (the Arweave Name System) — a smart, decentralized DNS that maps long cryptographic transaction IDs to human-readable names, eliminating broken links and creating resilient web access for decentralized sites.
Together, these components make up what Mataras calls the “permanent cloud” — a cloud-scale infrastructure that can be deployed anywhere: from a Raspberry Pi to a full data center. Each gateway stakes RIO tokens to participate, earns rewards for maintaining uptime, and contributes to a global, censorship-resistant data layer.
A sustainable model for data permanence
Unlike traditional storage systems that rely on recurring payments, AR.IO uses a one-time payment model — “pay once, store forever.” This ensures long-term reliability without depending on ongoing revenue to keep data alive. Since mainnet launch, AR.IO has:
- Registered over 4,000 domain names via ArNS.
- Reached 700 gateways worldwide.
- Onboarded 60,000 monthly uploaders and 800,000 readers.
- Processed more than 20 billion transactions, totaling over 0.25 petabytes of data.
- Streamed 70 TB of data per day, averaging 2,200 network requests per second.
Importantly, Mataras stressed sustainability. The network’s reward emissions — initially increased to attract gateway operators — will gradually decline, creating a balanced, self-sustaining economy fueled by real usage and name purchases rather than inflationary incentives.
A DePIN case study: air safety through permanent data
To show how AR.IO supports DePIN projects in practice, Mataras highlighted DA Network, a decentralized network that aggregates flight and air-traffic data from around the world.
DA needed a way to store critical aviation information permanently and verifiably — something that existing cloud providers couldn’t guarantee. Using AR.IO, the network achieved:
- High-throughput uploads through Turbo, making data instantly accessible without waiting for mining confirmation.
- Dedicated gateways optimized for their use case, earning RIO rewards that can be reinvested into further storage.
- Decentralized hosting of their public flight-tracking portal via ArNS, ensuring uninterrupted access and regulatory transparency.
Today, DA nodes track over 80,000 aircraft and have logged 10 million data points — all stored permanently for just $161 in total cost. For a network where trust in data integrity directly affects safety, permanence isn’t just a feature — it’s the foundation.
Why permanence matters for DePIN
For most DePIN networks — whether they track mobility, weather, compute, or sensors — data is the connective tissue. Yet 90% of today’s DePINs still rely on mutable, often centralized infrastructure. AR.IO’s model directly addresses that vulnerability: it guarantees immutability, verifiability, and censorship resistance while keeping access open and location-independent.
“Not every blockchain is designed to store everything forever,” said Mataras. “But DePIN networks generate data that needs to outlive the devices that produced it.”
That’s where the permanent cloud comes in — offering a data layer that’s both chain-agnostic and interoperable. Developers can use Ethereum, Solana, or Cosmos wallets; store any file type; and verify it years later with mathematical certainty.
Toward the sovereign web
In the broader context of Web3 and DePIN, AR.IO’s vision fits into a growing movement toward sovereign access — where builders and users control their data, domains, and infrastructure without relying on intermediaries.
From NFTs and social platforms to AI training datasets and real-world assets, permanence unlocks new design space: applications that are not just decentralized in principle but durable in practice.
As Mataras closed his talk, he invited builders to join that effort:
“Upload your data. Optimize access. Monetize what you create.
The tools are here — and the network is ready.”
