AO airdrop weakness and ecological stagnation: Has Arweave's newly launched "decentralized computing" narrative failed?

Author: Frank, PANews

On February 11, the veteran decentralized storage protocol Arweave launched the decentralized computing platform AO and released an official announcement stating that the first mainnet token minting has been completed, and new token minting will take place daily at 18:20 Eastern Time. Unlike the simultaneous airdrops of Story and Solayer, AO's release seems to have failed to generate much buzz on social media. From a visionary perspective, AO is closely related to the current hottest AI topics, and Arweave, as a mature decentralized storage infrastructure, can provide significant support on the underlying network.

The "silence" of the once-discussed star, Arweave and AO, raises the question of whether it is due to the decline of the ecosystem or yet another gem overlooked by the market.

Low Airdrop Expectations Lead to Market Apathy

The first reason AO may have been overlooked is that this token issuance did not bring much expectation to the market. According to official information, the total issuance of AO tokens is 21 million, adopting a halving mechanism similar to Bitcoin. In the initial reward distribution, 36% is allocated to AR holders, and 64% incentivizes cross-chain asset bridging (such as DAI, stETH). As of February 12, data shows that 3.214 million AO tokens have been minted.

As of February 11, 2025, the issuance of AR is 65.65 million. Based on this ratio, the current issuance ratio of AR to AO is 20.78:1. The exchanges that have launched pre-market trading are LBank and MEXC, but there is a significant price discrepancy between the two. The pre-market price on LBANK is about $92, while MEXC's price is only around $35, a difference of more than 100%. However, in terms of trading volume, LBANK's 24-hour pre-market trading volume is $1.97 million, higher than MEXC's trading volume. Therefore, LBANK's price may be more in line with market expectations. Based on the current high pre-market price of $92, AO's circulating market cap is approximately $290 million.

According to previous official data, an average AR token holder may receive 0.016 AO tokens, which, at the pre-market price of $92, means AR holders could receive AO worth about $14.72 each over the next few months. This distribution already exceeds the value of a single AR. However, considering the nearly 80% decline in AR over the past six months, from a peak of $49.55 in May 2024 to $9.52 on February 11, users holding AR would need to hope for AO's opening price to rise to around $500 to offset their losses.

As of February 11, the total number of AR holding addresses is 211,000. Based on this, each address could receive about 4.44 AO, valued at $409 (though this figure is only an estimate, and the actual value must comply with airdrop rules). According to current official data, the top 100 addresses holding AO collectively hold 2.21 million tokens, accounting for about 70%, indicating a concentration of holdings among large holders. From the overall airdrop scale, if the pre-market price remains at $92, the scale could reach $290 million. However, if the price is only around $35, the airdrop scale would drop to just $110 million. Considering the continuous decline of AR tokens, it is indeed difficult to spark market enthusiasm.

Network Activity Has Increased, but Overall Levels Remain Low

In fact, the overall activity level of the Arweave network has never been particularly high. For example, on February 11, the daily active addresses on Arweave were 3,366, which is relatively high compared to historical data. Before 2023, daily active addresses were generally around 1,000, and in 2024, the daily active data increased to the 2,000 level. Entering 2025, perhaps due to the anticipation of AO's airdrop, daily active data has generally risen above 3,000, with one day reaching over 5,000.

Additionally, as a decentralized storage network, the volume of data uploaded may be one of the most important indicators of activity level. On-chain data shows that since the end of 2023, the daily data upload volume on Arweave has been steadily increasing, with average daily uploads rising from over 100 GB to over 400 GB. Although the peak is still below the single-day record of 2.02 TB set in 2022, the overall upload volume is indeed showing a stable upward trend.

From the perspective of network activity, ArDrive is the most active application within the Arweave network. About 90% of daily data uploads are done through ArDrive. ArDrive is a permanent storage application on the Arweave network that allows users to permanently save their files without censorship. In 2022, ArDrive completed a $17.2 million seed round of financing. Besides ArDrive, another ecosystem project, Irys, contributed about 10% of the upload volume.

Additionally, there is a strange data phenomenon within the Arweave ecosystem: since June 1, 2024, the total number of addresses on Arweave has not increased, remaining fixed at 211,366. It is unclear whether this indicates a complete stagnation in user growth within the ecosystem or an issue with data maintenance in the browser. However, just like AO's lukewarm reception, these detail bugs have gone largely unaddressed.

AO Ecosystem Still in Very Early Stages

According to official data, the current TVL of the AO network is approximately $315 million. Compared to the $700 million during the testnet phase, this represents a significant decline. This suggests that users are not particularly enthusiastic about the subsequent staking token incentives of the AO network.

From the perspective of ecosystem projects, several related projects are still in the early stages of development, such as AOX, the main cross-chain bridge in the AO network, which announced on February 11 that its trading volume has surpassed $8 million, with a TVL exceeding $3 million. Another ecosystem project, FusionFi, announced that its settlement amount has surpassed $10 million.

In terms of social media interaction, the AO ecosystem has several projects that are currently operational:

• Marketverse AI: AI agent project
• StarGrid Battle Tactics: On-chain game
• Decent.land: EVM virtual machine
• AOX: Cross-chain bridge
• FusionFi Protocol: AgentFi
• Permaswap: DEX
• Astro Labs: Liquidity provider and stablecoin USDA issuance
• RedStone Oracles: Oracle project

Overall, the AO network is still a nascent product. There is currently no dedicated browser, no official ecosystem map, and no clear announcement on when AO will officially launch trading. Even after a year of testing, the current state of the ecosystem seems to remain in a rough form. Therefore, public expectations for AO may be difficult to gauge.

From another perspective, perhaps AO's innovative technical concepts were the main reason for the market's initial investment expectations. However, based on the results presented after the mainnet launch, it appears more like a half-completed exam paper, with only partial interpretations of the token mechanism issues. Its claimed AI potential and core narrative of performance upgrades through permanent storage have yet to deliver tangible results. For AO, the key to success lies in whether it can translate its technical narrative into practical applications, rather than relying solely on token incentives.