Last week we shipped a HyperBEAM device capable of S3-compatible temporary storage, in preparation to build a storage network on top of AO with native optional Arweave permanence.
We originally built this to solve our own problem: all data in Load Network flows through the EVM node to Arweave, but when the on-node storage is pruned, data still needs to be held somewhere in a hot cache with a lightweight availability proof, before being finally committed to Arweave.
We've since come across more typical, general use cases for Arweave-adjacent temporary storage. Some projects might find Arweave's strong permanence guarantees are impossible from a regulatory standpoint -- GDPR, healthcare, etc -- but want to use a system where some data can be deleted and some is permanent.
Load S3 storage layer takes the most widely-adopted storage standard in web2, and makes it available to the AO network via HyperBEAM. The Decent Land Labs team’s HyperBEAM device is deployed on our own bare metal with 300TB of capacity and will act as the first storage provider in the upcoming network.
Equipped with the power of Arweave’s permanence, Load's HyperBEAM S3 layer is the middleground, and has plenty of use cases outside of the highly regulated B2B world. One B2C use case we're going to look at today is fast file sharing.
A user's journey might go like this:
I want to quickly send a friend a 3GB .zip of videos. I drag and drop it to our Discord chat and hit the 25MB limit. I try to send it on Telegram and hit the 2GB limit. I go to WeTransfer and would have to buy a monthly subscription to send the file. Zippyshare's dead, Mediafire's free tier is now very limited... there aren't many options.
share.ao
share.ao was built to solve this frustration - and is the first file sharing app built on top of HyperBEAM and ao network!
Anonymously and with no subscription plan, it’s possible to upload up to 3GB of data per share per session and keep the data alive for up to 7 days. On the premium plan, storage size is 30GBper day per user and the data retention is up to 30 days. Using the history page, logged in users can see everything they’ve uploaded in the past, making share.ao useful for personal file storage as well as for quickly sharing files that are too big for chat apps to handle.
How it works behind the scenes
In this beta release, share.ao offers only storage based on the HyperBEAM S3 layer, across different tiers. In the next release we aim to integrate ANS-104 serialization for the Premium account temporary shares, facilitating the migration of shared data from Load S3 to Arweave permanently.
Simplifying the full technical picture, share.ao can be seen as an abstraction app built on top of HyperBEAM’s Load S3 and ao network. When a user uploads data for a quick share, the data gets uploaded to the Load’s ~s3@1.0 device (hyperbeam MinIO cluster) directly via presigned put_object URL, which afterwards, the device automatically handles data retention, redundancy and erasure coding.
share.ao’s bucket on the Load S3 layer is private, therefore only the user with the share’s UID (which is an ANS-104 ID) can access and download the share’s files. On the privacy side, for the free plan, share.ao website collects no cookies or identifying statistics over the user’s usage and activities, and if you want complete privacy over your data uploads, switch on the VPN and communicate with the HyperBEAM node directly and privately!
Long story short, share.ao is built on of the OSS HyperBEAM S3-hosting device, at the time of writing, and the app’s beta release, the s3-edge branch deployment is used.
What’s coming next
Apart from the ANS-104 Arweave bridge for the Premium plan, we plan on rolling out higher Premium tiers with higher data and retention period limits. Additionally we have plans to integrate ao tokens micropayments for pay-to-download shares, which is a fit for content creators and paid content anonymous quick sharing.
On the same token angle, Premium plans will be able to use AO network tokens to pay the subscription fees instead of Stripe only, reinforcing the privacy of the paying users.
Additionally we will work in the access control of the shares, making it possible to whitelist who can access the shared share via email or Arweave address. That's not everything, and what really matters is the feedback of the users, so please reach out to us via X, Instagram or TikTok if you would like to request a feature or report a bug.
Warning: we will be sharing too many memes across our social media accounts.