What is ao?
ao is a permissionless, decentralized compute platform built on Arweave. It runs across a network of distributed nodes, providing an environment where thousands of independent processes can execute in parallel.
Core Concepts
Section titled “Core Concepts”Actor-Oriented Model
Section titled “Actor-Oriented Model”ao adopts an actor-oriented architecture inspired by Erlang:
- Actors: Self-contained processes that maintain their own state and behavior.
- Message Passing: Actors communicate exclusively via asynchronous messages—no shared memory—ensuring isolation and fault tolerance.
- Dynamic Scaling: Actors can spawn new actors on demand, allowing your workloads to expand seamlessly under load.
This model eliminates memory contention and supports fine-grained concurrency, so computations scale with the network.
Holographic State & Consensus
Section titled “Holographic State & Consensus”Unlike blockchains that reach consensus on global state, ao uses a holographic state mechanism:
- Immutable Log Storage All actor interactions are recorded as logs on Arweave, guaranteeing permanence and auditability.
- Local State Reconstruction Nodes reconstruct actor state from the shared log, avoiding expensive global state machine consensus.
This approach reduces on-chain processing, improves throughput, and leverages Arweave’s permanent archive as a trust layer.