What is Bundlr and Why Did We Switch to it?

the first crucial step to self publishing is done!

Good morning to all Spatium Stories fans, followers, and strangers alike!

Today, we are going to take a deep dive into a recent update to our core system. I want to talk about why this update is important even though many of you wouldn’t even have noticed it happened.

The official update is…drum roll please…we switched to using Bundlr!

Now, most of you probably have no idea what Bundlr is or why it’s missing an ‘e’. Like, why is it so trendy to lose vowels? Sorry, that was a tangent.

Let’s talk about Bundlr.

First, I’ll just post a quote from their official website explaining what Bundlr’s mission is:

“Bundlr Network is bringing the speed and ease of traditional data storage solutions to web3 blockchain technology. We make it easy for developers and businesses to store their data on Arweave, across multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Avalanche.”

So that is their mission, how did they actually get started, though? What is their story?

“Bundlr was inspired in April 2021 after founder and CEO, Josh Benaron, learned about Arweave’s struggle to scale transactions per second. Determined to find a solution, Josh created Bundlr that not only improves Arweave’s TPS, but enables faster, easier, and multichain transactions.”

Before I dive in, I want to share two data points you’ll find on the Bundlr website. These 2 data points are the whole reason we made the switch.

• Bundlr is processing over 90% of data uploaded to Arweave

• Bundlr increases upload speeds by over 3000%

Ok, so what does any of that mean??

Let me first break down what Arweave is in an oversimplified way, and why we use Arweave in the first place.

What is Arweave?

Remember, Spatium Stories is built on the Deso blockchain. Deso is a blockchain designed with the capabilities to scale social applications and store all of that social data on-chain. All of our book NFTs are Deso NFTs stored on their blockchain.

Arweave is another blockchain network. However, Arweave is designed to store files.

I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but Arweave is like the number one storage blockchain network right now. There are others, but we won’t go there now.

Arweave is designed to store your files in a way that they can never be deleted or altered. Thus they are censorship resistant. 

They also designed their network to easily scale for storage up to 200+ years! Thus, they are future-proof and permanent!

How is Arweave typically used today? Well, I’d wager the majority of NFT projects out there store their assets on Arweave.

What do I mean? 

Well, when you bought that Bored Ape for $200K, that actual image file was probably stored on Arweave. I haven’t looked into their project to verify that’s how they do it, but I’m pretty sure it is.

That’s because Ethereum and Solana were not designed to handle heavy data storage like images, books, or videos.

However, Arweave was and has now been doing it successfully for some time. 

The other reason is this means the storage is decentralized and permanent. If you store the image of the Bored Ape on Google drive, what happens if Google goes down, or the person controlling the file deletes it?

That can’t happen with Arweave.

Now, our article today is not supposed to be about Arweave as a whole, so, if you are still confused, here is a great resource Arweave put out explaining what they are.

https://arweave.medium.com/what-is-arweave-explain-like-im-five-425362144eb5

TLDR on Arweave; they are a blockchain network for storing data resources like images, videos, or books. They are the most well-known and commonly used data storage blockchain network for storing NFT assets. The reason is that you know they are going to stick around forever. 

So what does Arweave have to do with Spatium Stories?

Well, just like most other NFT projects out there, we too are using Arweave for storing our assets. Specifically the cover image for your book and the book file itself.

Now, keep in mind, thanks to our Dragon protocol, the book file that’s stored on Arweave is an encrypted book file.

That’s because Arweave is a public blockchain. Anyone can access any file put on the blockchain. That’s the beauty of it, but this also means we need to be careful not to give away an author’s IP for the sake of storing it on-chain.

Thus the Dragon protocol was born! But I’ll save that for another article…soon!

Arweave vs Bundlr

Ok, so earlier I gave you a bunch of random quotes about this Bundlr thing. What on earth is it, though?

To sum up all those quotes, Bundlr is like a second layer on top of Arweave that speeds up uploading files to the Arweave network. 

They are basically another decentralized blockchain network that takes care of the Arweave upload for you.

Arweave has gained tremendous traction over the years and as such sometimes uploading data can be slower than anticipated. 

Bundlr speeds that transaction up by what they claim to be 3000%! That’s much much faster!

Furthermore, almost everyone (90% according to Bundlr) has switched to using Bundlr for uploading files to Arweave. In fact, the core Arweave team is now encouraging people to use Bundlr rather than the core Arweave uploading API's. 

That tells me one really important detail: Bundlr can be trusted.

If 90% have switched and they are officially verified by the Arweave team itself, then I’m in.

But wait, there’s more!

Bundlr has also integrated with a lot of major blockchains for payment. Yes, that’s right, it costs money to store things on Arweave. How else would this work?

But the money is dispersed in a decentralized way to reward the people that maintain the network. Like Bitcoin or any other blockchain network.

To use Arweave straight up, you need to purchase their AR token to upload files. This is actually kind of a pain to do. There aren’t too many wallets out there that support AR and it’s just kind of annoying.

Bundlr, however, makes it so you can easily pay your storage costs using SOL, ETH, Polygon, or a multitude of other cryptocurrencies! 

How this improves Spatium Stories

This improvement comes in 2 flavors.

First, Bundlr was insanely easy to set up. It took me about an hour to read about Bundlr and then have a service up and running that I could use to upload files for Spatium Stories.

That’s awesome! 

Second, the Arweave service I built for Spatium Stories was not flawless. It was sometimes slow and randomly failed to upload images. I never figured out why on earth that happened.

But with Bundlr, everything is fast and reliable!

Plus I can attach my Solana wallet to pay for everything, which is much faster and insanely easy.

Maybe one day they’ll integrate Deso payments :)

What does this mean for you?

Well, this upload service is the crucial first step toward releasing our self-publishing features! 

Until now, I’ve done all the uploading on my local machine, but now we have a fully functioning upload service API that is super quick and reliable.

This is the first step to you being able to publish books on the Deso blockchain in a secure and reliable way.

That is why this is such an exciting announcement! 

Step 1 is done, time to keep building!