Arweave founder blasted storage solution Irys: Forking is okay, but can you discuss it with everyone first

Words: Sam Williams, Founder, Arweave

Compiler: Paimon, Foresight News

Arweave, a perpetual storage protocol, is in the midst of a fork, and its storage solution Irys (formerly known as Bundlr Network) is considering forking Arweave, no longer maintaining ecological datasets, and will reset the token supply. Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, accused Irys of being greedy for the “sociopathic fork”.

The following is the full text of the same Williams speech on social media, translated by Foresight News.

Irys is planning an Arweave fork this week.

Bifurcation is necessary for permanent storage to maintain long-term resilience. There are two ways to fork Arweave, both prosocial and anti-social, and unfortunately it’s the latter that Irys is pursuing. Let’s discuss this issue today.

Tl; dr

• Out of greed, Irys is considering abandoning the dataset and resetting the token supply in order to fork Arweave.
• There is an established mechanism in the network called protocol evolution that allows for secure forks and network upgrades, but Irys seems to have ignored this
• There is a brand new, 100% free, 100% Irys-compatible bundle program on the website. Simply replace the current Irys node URL to use, which completely solves the problem for Arweave users.
• In light of this situation, ar.io network has decided to remove the Irys bundler from the trusted assembly of the Arweave master gateway. This will result in a significant delay before user data is available.

Background

Forks are an important part of blockchain governance. They allow the community to try different approaches and solve problems together.

However, for a permanent storage network, the fork needs to be done in the right way, i.e., saving and expanding the state, not breaking it. If forked in this way, the network will be able to improve itself over time and bypass problems, keeping the dataset secure. If the fork doesn’t go this way, it means that all data is purged on a regular basis, making it impossible to achieve information permanence.

In order to facilitate the smooth evolution of the Arweave protocol through forks, our ecosystem has developed protocol evolution guidelines. You can read about it here.

This guideline can be seen as a blockchain network social law.

A brief description of the evolution of the Arweave protocol

In a nutshell, the rules of the forked system look like this:

• Anyone can create a fork at any time.
• The fork should inherit the network’s dataset and token supply.
• A fork can also mint any number of new tokens to compensate its builders.

This system allows forks to compete and improve protocols in a way that benefits society: creating markets for new ideas and rewarding innovators while ensuring the security of datasets. It also allows token holders to accumulate a range of tokens in a series of forks of the network, or actively trade those tokens when they feel that one or another fork is preferable. It’s a win-win for everyone.

So what is the Irys fork?

We’ve heard from reliable sources that Irys is considering forking Arweave. Although Arweave’s development framework already exists, they plan to no longer maintain the dataset and instead reset the token supply.

When asked why, they said they didn’t want to support existing data and didn’t want to “hand over tokens to a bunch of **”. It’s hard to find any other reason than greed.

Denigration of the 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.

We still hope that they will eventually build their fork the right way. We’re always open to communicating with them about this, and we’ll support their experiments as long as their fork is in a way that helps the ecosystem.

What if Irys users don’t want to be a part of this farce

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

Luckily, switching bundles is pretty straightforward and solves problems across our ecosystem.

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

To switch to the free Arweave bundle, simply replace the Irys node URL in your code with .

Irys is currently part of a group of trusted bundlers, and content from Irys can be featured on the main portal of the Arweave ecosystem, even if the content is not fully on-chain. However, since Arweave has lost trust in Irys that “the data will eventually be fully uploaded”, Irys’ data caching will be disabled on Arweave and related portals maintained by the ar.io network. This will result in a significant delay of approximately 20 minutes to 1 hour before content previously uploaded through Irys reaches viewable levels.