Arweave was "forked" by the ecological project Irys, and the founders blamed each other, and decentralization was challenged

By Nancy, PANews

On the fifth anniversary, the old decentralized storage Arweave is in a fork crisis. On December 18, Arweave’s ecological Web3 storage solution Irys was revealed to be planning to fork Arweave and reset the token supply, and Arweave will remove the trusted identity of its main gateway. In response, Irys said that Arweave founder Sam Williams went against the project’s vision and tried to spin it off the Arweave ecosystem.

According to Sam, citing a trusted source, Irys (formerly Bundlr Network) is planning to fork Arweave, no longer maintain the dataset and reset the token supply, ignoring the protocol evolution mechanism, which allows the network to be forked and upgraded in a secure manner.

Sam further explained that forks are an important part of blockchain governance, and Arweave allows for a socially beneficial way to compete and improve protocols to support forks. According to Arweave’s fork rules, anyone can create a fork at any time, inherit the network’s dataset and token supply, and even mint any number of new tokens to compensate their builders. However, in the case of a permanent storage network, forking needs to be done by saving and building state, rather than destroying state, which only leads to the impossibility of information permanence and the periodic discarding of all data.

As for the reason for the fork, Sam said that the reason for the Irys fork could only be due to greed, they don’t want to support existing data, and they don’t want to “hand over tokens to a bunch of **”. But denigration of the Arweave ecosystem aside, this short-sighted approach even hampers their own permanent storage projects. If the dataset and token supply are constantly being reset, it is unlikely that any fork will successfully complete the long-term storage task.

As the protagonist of this infighting, Irys is a multi-chain extension solution based on Arweave, which is compatible with many mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Aptos, Polygon, Solana, Avalanche, etc. According to data disclosed by Irys in October, it has completed more than 1 billion transactions in less than two years in the city and is responsible for processing more than 95% of Arweave transactions. This data intuitively shows the important position of Irys in the Arweave ecosystem, which can be described as a unique one.

Irys’ response to Sam’s complaint was merely that “Sam’s actions are tragically ironic in his attempt to spin Irys out of Arweave, which is intended to be open source and permissionless software.” Irys has never been, and never will, deprive users of the right to choose where their data is stored, and creating unrestricted access to permanent data for users is at the heart of what Irys does. Irys remains committed to resisting censorship, open source, and permissionless technology. If users have difficulty retrieving data due to Arweave’s proactive review, Irys welcomes users to point the application to Irys’ hosting gateway, and users with questions are welcome to get in touch with Irys at any time. In addition, Irys said that it is considering a number of new features.

Obviously, Irys didn’t respond positively to the fork issue. However, regarding the risk of a fork at any time, Sam said that ar.io network plans to remove Irys bundlers from the trusted settings of the main Arweave gateway, which will cause a significant delay (about 20 minutes to 1 hour) before user data is available, and he will also discuss opening a Space on X about this event. Forward Research is currently running a free Arweave bundler service, supported by the ar.io network, which will continue to be available after user migration. If you want to use the free Arweave bundler service, you can simply replace the Irys node URL in your code with a up.arweave.net.

At present, the infighting is still inconclusive, but it has also exposed the ecological fragility of Arweave’s over-reliance on Irys, and its development model needs to be reviewed urgently.