Unofficial Arweave forking plans draw community controversy

Irys, a prominent layer-2 network within the Arweave ecosystem, allegedly has plans to fork the Arweave network with the intent to “drop the dataset and reset the token supply,” according to a Dec. 17 post by Arweave founder Sam Williams.

He alleges that despite the existence of a safe upgrade mechanism with Arweave, Irys developers plan to proceed with a hard fork that “appears to be a play motivated by greed.” The Arweave founder wrote:

“Given this situation, Arweave intends to remove the Irys bundlers from the trusted set on the main Arweave gateways. This will lead to significant delays before user data is available.”

In a rebuttal post the same day, Irys developers stated, “Are we developing new provenance tech? You bet your ass we are,” accusing Arweave developers of “active censorship” in response to alleged efforts to “deplatform Irys from Arweave.” Developers added, “Stay tuned to this space; we have plenty of powerful new features we’re thinking through, and we can’t wait to share them.”

In the past two days, the Arweave token has lost over 20% of its value and is now trading at $8.90, partly due to the unveiling of the allegations. Irys is currently the largest layer-2 network on Arweave, accounting for over 90% of the blockchain’s 16 million daily transaction volume. However, the network’s volume has fallen by 31% since the allegations surfaced.

Related: NFTs, gaming and storage: The key to Filecoin and Arweave accruing value?

As an immutable decentralized storage network, Arweave stores Web2 and Web3 data, such as web pages, gaming data, images and metadata for nonfungible tokens, and more. Around 74.26 pebibytes (83.6 million gigabytes) of data are stored on the Arweave blockchain.