Arweave founder condemns malicious fork of Web3 storage solution Irys: destroying permanence

Sam Williams, founder of the Arweave protocol, said in an article published on the X platform that according to reliable sources, the Web3 storage solution Irys (formerly known as Bundlr Network) is considering a fork of Arweave in a way that could adversely affect the entire ecosystem.

Irys plays a key role in the Arweave ecosystem, handling the majority of Arweave transaction volume and is regarded as an important scaling solution for Arweave. Therefore, the community has shown great concern about the news that Irys plans to fork Arweave.

Irys’s fork plan cannot achieve the permanent preservation of information

However, Irys’s fork plan does not seem to be able to achieve the goal of permanent preservation of information. Sam first pointed out that although forks are necessary for permanent storage networks to enhance long-term resilience, in Arweave, there are ecologically beneficial forks and negative forks, and Irys takes the latter.

Irys’s fork plan involves abandoning the existing dataset and resetting the token supply. When asked why, Irys stated that they were unwilling to continue supporting existing data and were ready to provide tokens to Arweave. In this regard, Sam pointed out: apart from greed, it is difficult for them to find other reasonable explanations.

Sam emphasized that the Arweave network has a mature protocol evolution mechanism to support safe forks and network upgrades, but Irys chose to ignore this key mechanism. He briefly introduced Arweave’s protocol evolution mechanism:

• Anyone can establish a fork at any time.

• Forks should maintain the network’s dataset and token supply.

• Forks can mint new tokens to compensate their builders.

This mechanism allows forks to be carried out while protecting the status quo rather than destroying it, thus helping the network improve itself and solve problems, ensuring the security of the data set. Without this approach, information permanence cannot be achieved, as all data would be at risk of being periodically discarded.

Unfortunately, the fork plan that Irys is considering is to choose not to maintain the data set and restart the token supply, which violates Arweave’s protocol evolution principles.

Sam finally said that this incident will be discussed on XSpace.

What can Irys users do?

In response to Irys’s fork plan, Arweave has taken the following measures:

• 1. Provide a free alternative packager (Bundler) service: Forward in the Arweave ecosystem Research is running a free Arweave packager service that is compatible with Irys. This allows users to continue using the Arweave network seamlessly by replacing the Irys node URL in their code to up.arweave.net, ensuring continued uploading and storage of data.

• 2. Remove trust status of Irys packer: As Irys intends to abandon existing datasets and reset the token supply, this destroys the trust relationship with the Arweave ecosystem. Therefore, ar.ionetwork plans to remove the Irys packager from the trust list of the Arweave mainnet portal. The impact is that content uploaded via Irys will experience significant delays (on the order of 20 minutes to an hour) before the data is available for viewing.

• 3. Provide user support: To help users make a smooth transition from Irys, ar.ionetwork provides one-on-one support services, and users can directly send private messages to contact them.

These measures are designed to ensure the stability of the Arweave network and the permanence of data, while providing community members with the necessary support and resources to reduce the possible impact of the Irys fork plan .

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