Author: Nancy, PANews

On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, the veteran decentralized storage Arweave has fallen into a fork crisis. On December 18th, Irys, a Web3 storage solution in the Arweave ecosystem, was reported to be planning to fork Arweave and reset the token supply. Arweave will remove the trusted identity of its main gateway. In response, Irys stated that Arweave founder Sam Williams violated the project's vision and attempted to detach it from the Arweave ecosystem.

According to Sam, citing a reliable source, Irys (formerly Bundlr Network) is planning to fork Arweave, cease maintaining the dataset, and reset the token supply, disregarding the protocol's mechanism for evolution, which allows for secure forking and network upgrades.

Sam further explained that forking is an important part of blockchain governance, and Arweave allows for competition and protocol improvement in a way that benefits society. According to Arweave's forking rules, anyone can create a fork at any time and should inherit the network's dataset and token supply, and even mint any number of new tokens to compensate its builders. However, for a permanent storage network, forking needs to be done in a way that preserves and builds on the state, rather than destroying it, as this would only result in the inability to achieve information permanence, and all data would be regularly discarded.

Regarding the reasons for the fork, Sam stated that the only possible reason for Irys to fork is greed; they do not want to support existing data and do not want to "hand over the tokens to a group of **." However, aside from the defamation of the Arweave ecosystem, this short-sighted approach even hinders their own permanent storage project. If the dataset and token supply are constantly reset, then any fork cannot successfully fulfill long-term storage tasks.

As the main character in this internal conflict, Irys is a multi-chain expansion solution based on Arweave, compatible with various mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Aptos, Polygon, Solana, Avalanche, and others. According to data disclosed by Irys in October of this year, it has completed over 1 billion transactions in less than two years and is responsible for processing over 95% of Arweave's transactions. This data intuitively reflects the important position of Irys in the Arweave ecosystem, making it a dominant player.

In response to Sam's accusations, Irys only responded by stating, "Sam's actions are tragically ironic; he is trying to detach Irys from Arweave, while the purpose of Arweave is open-source and permissionless software. Irys has never and will never deprive users of the right to choose the location of data storage. Enabling unrestricted access to permanent data for users is the core work of Irys. Irys remains committed to resisting censorship, open-source code, and permissionless technology. If users have difficulty retrieving data due to active censorship by Arweave, Irys welcomes users to point their applications to Irys's hosted gateway and is available to assist users with any issues at any time." In addition, Irys also stated that it is considering launching a large number of new features.

Clearly, Irys did not directly address the forking issue. However, regarding the risk of forking that could occur at any time, Sam stated that the ar.io network plans to remove Irys bundlers from the trusted settings of the Arweave main gateway, which will result in significant delays (approximately 20 minutes to 1 hour) before user data is available. He will also open a Space on X to discuss this event. Currently, with the support of the ar.io network, Forward Research is running a free Arweave bundler service, which will continue to be provided after user migration. If users want to use the free Arweave bundler service, they only need to replace the Irys node URL in the code with up.arweave.net.

Currently, this internal conflict has not yet reached a conclusion, but it has also exposed the vulnerability of Arweave's ecosystem due to its excessive reliance on Irys, and its development model urgently needs to be re-evaluated.

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