The Arweave blockchain is designed to store data in perpetuity. Through an endowment, which your storage payment goes towards, it can continue to pay miners in the network to preserve your data indefinitely. As Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, says:

"[Arweave is] a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever – for the very first time."

Read more about the Arweave protocol here.

We are currently building a fully decentralised app, deployed directly on Arweave: Akord Explorer. 

Explorer will be able to find any data you sent to Arweave through Akord.

In practical terms, this means once the app itself is deployed on Arweave it will also be permanently available. Indeed every release of the app would be available as well. 

So even if Akord, the company, stops working on the development of the app, Akord Explorer itself will continue to live on the permaweb. 

You will be able to connect to Akord Explorer with your normal Akord app login details and find all your uploads.

Learn more about the permaweb here.

You cannot delete files from the Arweave blockchain. This would be in opposition to its core mission of providing perpetual access – a truly permanent storage system. 

However, included in the Arweave protocol standards is ANS-106: Do-Not-Store Request, which provides a protocol and transaction format to make a request to miners to not store data. As outlined:

"There might be various reasons why persons or entities might wish to remove some data from the network. These include privacy, government regulation and copyright violations."

Within Akord, you can 'Revoke files', which moves them from your 'Files' tab in a vault into a separate "Revoked files" area. This would prevent anyone from renaming, moving, downloading or viewing the file. 

The file would continue to exist on the Arweave blockchain, but completely encrypted and essentially useless. Still, once a file is uploaded, regardless of whether it's revoked, it will continue to use your storage allowance. 

Always carefully consider the nature of permanent storage before uploading files, as not all data will be suitable.

YES!

Your payment goes into a storage endowment. It's like the principle upon which the interest goes towards paying the future storage of your data. Indefinitely. 

Read more about the Arweave storage endowment here.

To break it down into what this means in a very practical way: if you have 1 GB of storage on Akord and you upload 1 GB's worth of photos, you never have to pay again to keep those photos on Akord and on the Arweave blockchain. Even if you don't login to Akord for many many years, that data will be preserved and waiting for you.

You pay for storage within the Top up screen in the app. 

You can access this screen by first going to Storage in the main navigation, and then clicking the 'Top up' button in the top right.

You can pay with your credit card, no tokens required. 

We will be implementing crypto payments in 2023, allowing users to pay in ETH, BTC, AR, USDT and USDC.

To store data on Arweave you must pay in the native $AR coin. Akord takes care of this payment, leaving you with a simple credit card payment to make (we will be adding crypto payments in 2023).

The price of the $AR coin varies, which means the pricing on Akord will have to change from time to time, so we can ensure we have enough funds to cover the cost of Arweave storage. 

Akord owns a store of $AR tokens and we price our storage to allow for an additional service charge that will help us become a sustainable business. 

Changes to the Arweave protocol and developments in the crypto markets may also force us to change our model. 

We commit to being transparent in our methods when determining pricing, and will always seek to find a solution that represents value for our users as well as provide a viable business model.

No, you don't need the $AR coin to pay for storage in Akord. We take care of making the $AR payment to the network behind the scenes.

You also get 500 MB free to try out Akord and make your first uploads to Arweave on us.

We use Stripe as a credit card payment provider, who also support Apple pay and Google pay.

We plan on integrating third party wallets, so if you do hold $AR in a crypto wallet it will be possible to use this directly on Akord.

From the file menu you can select "View transaction", which will take you to viewblock.io, the blockchain explorer for Arweave, where you can see all the onchain data relating to your upload. 

If the file is a public file, there will be a link in the "Data" section where you can view the file directly.

If you copy the hash under the "Transaction" title at the top of the page and paste it after "arweave.net/" then you will see your file directly on the permaweb. 

Once you upload a file to Akord, you can immediately view a cached version of the file while in the background we're sending the file to Arweave. If you go straightaway to the file menu and select "View transaction", you will likely be greeted with a message from viewblock saying the file is not found. 

Don't panic! It takes some time for the Arweave network to confirm a transaction. The exact time varies and depends on a number of factors:

• File size
• Transaction rate on Akord's side
• Arweave network - if the network is processing many transactions at that time then it will take longer to confirm your file.

Under normal circumstances you should expect your file to be confirmed and accessible on viewblock in ~15 minutes. 

If you do not see your file after 1 day, please contact us on the help channel in our Discord.