Arweave faces a fork controversy, founder criticizes storage solution Irys

Written by: Sam Williams, Founder of Arweave

Compiled by: Paimon, Foresight News

The perpetual storage protocol Arweave is embroiled in a fork controversy, as its storage solution Irys (formerly Bundlr Network) is considering forking Arweave, abandoning the maintenance of ecological datasets, and resetting the token supply. Arweave founder Sam Williams has accused Irys of acting out of greed and choosing the aforementioned "antisocial fork." Below is the full statement from Sam Williams on social media:

This week, Irys plans to fork Arweave.

Forking is necessary for maintaining long-term resilience in permanent storage. There are both prosocial and antisocial ways to fork Arweave; unfortunately, Irys is pursuing the latter. Today, let’s discuss this issue.

TL;DR

• Out of greed, Irys is considering abandoning datasets, resetting the token supply, and forking Arweave.

• There is an established mechanism in the network called protocol evolution that can facilitate secure forking and network upgrades, but Irys seems to be ignoring this.

• A brand new, 100% free, 100% Irys-compatible bundler is available on the website. Simply replace the current Irys node URL to use it, which completely resolves the issues for Arweave users.

• In light of this situation, the ar.io network has decided to remove the Irys bundler from the trusted program list of the Arweave main gateway. This will result in significant delays before user data becomes available.

Background

Forking is an important part of blockchain governance. It allows communities to try different approaches to solve problems collaboratively.

However, for a permanent storage network, forking needs to be done in the right way, which is to preserve and expand the state rather than destroy it. If forking is done in this manner, the network can self-improve over time and circumvent issues, ensuring the security of datasets. If forking is not done this way, it means that all data will be periodically purged, making permanent information unattainable.

To facilitate the smooth evolution of the Arweave protocol through forking, our ecosystem has established protocol evolution guidelines. You can read more information here.

This guideline can be seen as a social law for blockchain networks.

Overview of Arweave Protocol Evolution

In short, the rules of the forking system are as follows:

• Anyone can create a fork at any time.

• The fork should inherit the network's datasets and token supply.

• The fork can also mint any number of new tokens to compensate its builders.

This system allows forks to compete and improve the protocol in a socially beneficial way: creating a market for new ideas while ensuring the security of datasets and rewarding innovators. It also allows token holders to accumulate a series of tokens across a range of forks in the network or actively trade these tokens when they believe one fork is preferable over another. This is a win-win for everyone.

So what is the Irys fork?

We have learned from reliable sources that Irys is considering forking Arweave. Although the development framework for Arweave already exists, they plan to abandon the maintenance of datasets and reset the token supply.

When asked about the reasons, they stated that they do not want to support existing data and do not want to "hand over tokens to a bunch of **." Aside from greed, it is hard to find other reasons.

Putting aside the disparagement of the ecosystem, this shortsighted approach even hinders their own permanent storage project. If the datasets and token supply are continuously reset, then no fork can successfully complete the long-term storage mission.

We still hope they can ultimately establish their fork in the right way. We are always open to communication with them on this matter, and as long as their forking approach benefits the ecosystem, we will support their experiments.

What if Irys users do not want to participate in this farce?

Irys can stop uploading your data to Arweave at any time.

Fortunately, switching bundlers is very simple and can resolve issues for our entire ecosystem.

@fwdresearch is currently running a free (100% subsidized) Arweave bundling service. We will continue to provide this service for the foreseeable future as users migrate. In the long run, both ar.io network and EverVision offer excellent hosting bundling services. Users can also install their own bundlers.

To switch to the free Arweave bundling service, simply replace the Irys node URL in the code with https://up.arweave.net.

Irys is currently part of the trusted bundler group, and even if the content is not fully on-chain, content from Irys can still be displayed on the main portal of the Arweave ecosystem. However, since Arweave has lost trust in Irys "eventually uploading all data," the data cache from Irys will be disabled on the Arweave and related portals maintained by the ar.io network. This will result in significant delays of about 20 minutes to 1 hour before content uploaded via Irys reaches a viewable level.