Today, Ritual is excited to announce our integration with Arweave, bringing permanent storage capabilities to the Ritual stack. By leveraging a decentralized storage solution like Arweave, Ritual can ensure that AI models, data, and proofs are stored trustlessly and are accessible to anyone in the ecosystem.

Check out the Ritual × Arweave docs site for more information.

Decentralized Storage and AI Sovereignty

Decentralized storage is an essential part of the Ritual stack, integrated across both Ritual Chain and Infernet in two key ways:

Arweave will function as a storage layer for AI models—nodes running in the Ritual network can dynamically upload and download models to and from Arweave.

Arweave will also serve as a hub for artifacts that requires permanent storage: this includes model-related metadata that Ritual Chain nodes can asynchronously use for proof, privacy, or verification, as well as static content such as NFT images, product metrics, etc.

To ensure that storage requests from Ritual’s users and developers are processed reliably and efficiently, Ritual and Arweave will collaborate to establish Dedicated Arweave Bundlers. These bundlers streamline the workflow by aggregating multiple storage requests and relevant metadata into optimized batches before submitting them to the Arweave Network.

New AI Primitive With Decentralized Storage

AI models and the data they generate are important assets. Storing them on centralized servers not only poses security risks but also hinders the advancement of crypto-native AI applications. This integration between Ritual and Arweave offers several advantages:

• Model Versioning and Provenance: for models that involve sensitive computation or need to maintain audit trails, Arweave provides an immutable ledger that can store the entire history of how models are developed and updated over time. This ensures full traceability, which is crucial for proving the integrity of an AI model.
• Verifiability and Accessibility: zero-knowledge proofs play a crucial role in ensuring the secure and verifiable execution of AI models. Artifacts for these computations, such as ZK programs and their metadata, should be preserved transparently and tamper-proof. Ritual will store these artifacts and their metadata on Arweave, allowing users to verify computation and ensuring trust in decentralized AI systems.
• Immutable Vector Database Storage: operators on Ritual can leverage vector databases with data stored immutably on Arweave. This ensures that all embeddings and source data used in AI responses are permanent, verifiable, and tamper-proof - particularly benefiting RAG-based workflows on Ritual.

Looking Forward

Our integration with Arweave unlocks new storage capabilities across models, proofs, and data. We’re excited to see what new applications and use cases our communities will come up with.

For all future updates, follow Ritual and Arweave on X. Got ideas for Ritual and Arweave’s tech? Submit them to Ritual Altar, or join our Discord community and we’ll be in touch.

About Ritual and Arweave

Ritual is building the first decentralized execution layer for AI, allowing any protocol, application, or smart contract to integrate AI models with a few lines of code. Our first product, Infernet, is a decentralized oracle network that allows developers on any EVM chain to access models from our node network via smart contracts. You can read more on our product page here. Our upcoming product, Ritual Chain, is an EVM blockchain built from the ground-up with AI/ML operations embedded natively into the chain. Ritual Chain integrates various co-processing sidecars that enable different compute-enhanced applications.

Arweave is a decentralized data storage network. Unlike traditional cloud services prone to centralization risks, Arweave ensures that data is immutably stored and censorship-resistant. Arweave is built to create a “permaweb” - a permanent, decentralized layer for applications and documents that ensures data immutability. This makes Arweave ideal for protocols requiring version control and historical preservation.

Disclaimer: This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. The information in this post should not be construed as a promise or guarantee in connection with the release or development of any future products, services or digital assets. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and is not made on behalf of Ritual or its affiliates and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Ritual, its affiliates or individuals associated with Ritual. All information in this post is provided without any representation or warranty of any kind. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.