Bering Waters Tech has announced the SOLAR Bridge launch to actively push the boundaries of blockchain’s scalability by building a game-changing bridge between Solana‘s blockchain and Arweave’s data storage solution, solving an imminent problem for all blockchains as they scale to meet the needs of financial networks.
Since using Solana’s high-performance blockchain generates a massive amount of data beyond the capacity of current storage technology, the development of Arweave’s solution couldn’t be more timely. “If you look at the Solana history, we originally started with our own storage solution for a high-performance blockchain. When you have a chain-like Solana that processes a massive amount of data, it needs to go somewhere, and it needs to be decentralized. We have seen amazing projects like Arweave solve this problem in a much better way than we could have. Arweave is hyper-optimized, censorship-resistant, and has some amazing features that make it feel like a decentralized big table from Google,” elaborated Co-Founder and CEO of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko.
Having invested in both companies, Bering Waters Ventures was interested in seeing them succeed in their collaboration. This led to the formation of Bering Waters Tech – a new company focused on solving technical problems for high growth blockchain companies.
The reason for Solana’s fast growth is clear: there is a race between blockchains to deliver scalability and large transaction capacity. Currently averaging 80 million transactions per day, Solana has the capacity to handle over 50 times that much, with average transaction fees of $0.00001 and sub-second settlements, making it the fastest blockchain on the market today.
The reason for selecting Arweave to handle the storage problem is also easy to see: the Arweave protocol provides permanent storage as a service. It is designed on blockchain technology to efficiently store massive quantities of data as immutably as the blockchain itself, creating crypto-economic incentives for miners to replicate as much data as possible. Their storage costs are covered innovatively, with an up-front fee whose interest accrual perpetually covers storage cost over time. This places Arweave ahead of major global corporations in permanent data storage areas, as these services are not available anywhere else.
Arweave‘s technology has already impacted many areas of technology, and the long-term benefits will continue to evolve over the next few years. “The issue that every network will face one day is how to indefinitely store the massive number of transactions that highly scalable blockchain solutions inevitably generate,” explained Founder of Arweave, Sam Williams. “Arweave is a perfect solution to this problem. We see Arweave rapidly becoming the standard for scalable chain storage in the industry, and we’re extremely excited to see Solana leading the way.”
Bering Waters Tech stepped in to build the SOLAR Bridge, which securely connects the two technologies, turning a cooperative partnership into a practical, real-world solution.
“Such a sudden leap forward always creates new challenges to existing technology. Even if the fiber internet existed in 1998, there weren’t computers that could handle this speed. Whenever we have a disruption in one sector, it pushes disruption in connected sectors that build solutions to benefit from the progress achieved by the other players in the market,” said Ewelina Leszczak, CEO and Founder of Bering Waters Tech. “Arweave and Solana are two technologies disrupting at the same time, and we saw the opportunity to make them interoperable.”
A primary focus for the SOLAR bridge design was built-in resilience to meet the financial industry’s stringent demands. It was critical to anticipate the requirements of future users, including compliance. The challenge was to handle Solana’s high transaction throughput while maintaining cost-efficiency in terms of data size and the number of blocks and transactions on Arweave.
Bering Waters Tech has validated its solution using a wide set of benchmarks, including historical and synthetic data sets, to stress-test the technology in both normal and extreme scenarios while maintaining cost and efficiency thresholds.