AR.IO Network wallet

What is AR.IO Network (ARIO)?

ARIO is the token of the AR.IO Network, the layer of gateways that sits between Arweave's permanent storage and the people who need to read from it. Arweave stores data once and keeps it; AR.IO gateways are the servers that index that data, serve it over ordinary web requests and resolve ArNS names, the human-readable names that point at permanent content. Gateway operators put up ARIO as a stake to join the network, and ArNS names are bought and renewed with ARIO. That is the whole job of the token: it is what the gateway network runs on, not a payment for storage itself (that is paid in AR).

What a holder should know

The canonical ARIO lives on Solana, which is also where the network's protocol state now runs; the network originally ran on AO, the compute layer built on top of Arweave, and moved to Solana. The token you can hold on Base is a bridged representation of that same asset, so there are two places an ARIO balance can sit, and they are not interchangeable by a plain transfer. On Solana the token is an SPL asset, so the first incoming transfer creates a token account funded with a little SOL, and every outgoing transfer needs SOL for the fee; on Base the fee is paid in ETH.

The ticker also has a history. Before mainnet the network used a test token called IO, and the live token is called ARIO. If you see "IO" somewhere, that is not this asset.

Supported networks in Tangem (2): Base, Solana. Because the same ARIO exists as separate tokens on separate chains, the Tangem app lists each network's balance on its own line and names the outgoing network on the signing screen, and it is worth reading that line before tapping the card. A holder who keeps both versions gets one card, one address per chain, and a clear view of which ARIO is which.