There are some individuals who have shown both a level of commitment and innovation within the Arweave that is next-level, Phil Mataras, Founder of ArDrive and AR.io, is an exemplar of this. His journey into Arweave started back in 2018, after having explored (and mining) Ethereum for 8 months. He needed to change direction, to get closer to utility at a fundamental level. After discovering the Permaweb, he quickly realized it's potential, building first versions of ArDrive.io; a Dropbox-like service that massively levels up the experience, providing decentralized and permanent storage. 

After growing his team and bringing in a total of almost 20 individual investors and just about $20 million USD, the mission has grown to provide decentralized (and incentivized) gateways for the Permaweb with AR.io. Gateways are the "front door" to the Permaweb and currently the arweave.net gateway is subsidized and in need of decentralization - something that is already happening with AR.io infrastructure!

We cover a ton in this episode, and Phil is truly a Permaweb Pioneer having been one of the early internet explorers to find out about this technology and subsequently build a widely used app that is ArDrive.io. 

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