So here is some crypto drama for you… 🍿 This week we heard that @irys_xyz is planning to fork Arweave. Permanent storage needs forks – they are required for long-term resilience. There is a pro-social and anti-social way (which Irys is unfortunately pursuing) of forking Arweave. Let’s take this opportunity to explore them… tl;dr: - @irys_xyz is considering forking Arweave. They intend to drop the dataset and reset the token supply. This appears to be a play motivated by greed, as users have placed their trust in Irys to upload to Arweave for them. - There is an established mechanism in the network, called protocol evolution, which allows a safe way to fork and upgrade the network. They are ignoring it. - There is a new, 100% free and 100% Irys compatible bundler available at up.arweave.net. Simply swap your Irys node URL to this one in order to use it. This conclusively solves the problem for Arweave users. - Given this situation, @ar_io_network 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. We will be organizing an X spaces soon. Stay tuned. Ok, now the details… 👇 Background Forks are an important part of blockchain governance. They allow communities to try out different approaches and to solve problems together. For a permanent storage network, however, forks need to be done in the right way: preserving and building on the state, not destroying it. When forks are done in this way, they allow the network to improve itself and route around problems over time, keeping the dataset safe. When forks are not done this way, they will not be able to achieve information permanence – as all of the data would be periodically dropped. In order to facilitate smooth evolution of the Arweave protocol through forks, our ecosystem has established the evolutionary protocol guidelines. You can read about them here: arweave.medium.com/arweave-i… Think of them like a social constitution for a blockchain network. Arweave protocol evolution in brief In a nutshell, the rules of the evolutionary forking system work like this: 1. Anyone can build a fork at any time. 2. That fork should carry forward the network’s dataset and token supply. 3. 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 pro-social way: the dataset remains safe, a market for new ideas is created, and innovators are rewarded. It also allows token holders to accrue a basket of tokens across the set of forks of the network, or to actively trade them if they believe that one or another fork is preferable. It’s a win-win for everyone. So what is the Irys fork? We have been informed by reliable sources that Irys is considering forking Arweave. Despite the existence of the framework for evolving Arweave, however, they plan not to maintain the dataset and to start the token supply from scratch. When asked why, they stated that they didn’t want to have to support the existing data and ‘give tokens to a bunch of (expletives)’. We are having a hard time finding reasons for this other than greed. Vulgarities about our ecosystem aside, this approach shortsightedly hampers even their own project of permanent storage. If the dataset and token supply are consistently reset, no fork can ever succeed at the long-term mission. We are still hoping that they see the light and decide to build their fork the right way. We are always open to chat and to support their experiment if it is done in a way that helps the ecosystem. What if I use Irys and don’t want to be part of this drama? Irys may stop uploading your data to Arweave at any time. Fortunately, switching bundlers is super easy and solves the whole problem for our entire ecosystem. @fwdresearch is currently running a free (100% subsidized) Arweave bundling service, thanks to the awesome support and services of @ar_io_network. We will keep this service running for the foreseeable future as users migrate. In the long-term, both @ar_io_network and @EverVision offer fantastic hosted bundling services. Alternatively, you can always spin up your own bundler for your app. All you need to do to switch to the free Arweave bundler is swap your Irys node URL in your code to up.arweave.net. @irys_xyz is currently part of a trusted group of bundlers that are allowed to ‘optimistically’ show their content on the main gateways of the Arweave ecosystem before their content settles onchain. This system requires trust that the data will eventually be uploaded to Arweave. Trust that has now been lost. As a consequence, the optimistic cache for Irys data will be imminently disabled on the @ar_io_network maintained arweave.net and associated gateways. The effect of this is that content uploaded through Irys will experience a significant delay before the data is available to view (~20 minutes to an hour). If you are an Irys user and you would like help migrating, DM @ar_io_network and we can get you setup with 1:1 support right away. If you are curious about the rationale for Arweave’s evolutionary forking system, check out our paper about it: arweave.net/loJ6EmO_2pTA313k… Crypto: It’s never boring 😄.