Unofficial Arweave forking plans draw community controversy

Irys, a prominent layer-2 network within the Arweave ecosystem, is facing backlash from the community over alleged plans to fork the Arweave network. The intention behind the proposed fork is to "drop the dataset and reset the token supply," according to a post by Arweave founder Sam Williams on Dec. 17.

Arweave founder accuses Irys of greed

Despite the availability of a safe upgrade mechanism within Arweave, Irys developers are reportedly moving forward with a hard fork that appears to be motivated by greed, according to Williams. In response to this, Arweave plans to remove the Irys bundlers from the trusted set on the main Arweave gateways, which will result in significant delays in accessing user data.

Irys developers deny allegations of censorship

In a rebuttal post on the same day, Irys developers denied the allegations and accused Arweave developers of "active censorship." They also stated that they are actively working on developing new provenance technology and promised to unveil powerful new features in the future.

Arweave token value takes a hit

Since the allegations were made public, the value of the Arweave token has decreased by over 20% in the past two days, currently trading at $8.90. Irys is currently the largest layer-2 network on Arweave, accounting for over 90% of the blockchain's daily transaction volume. However, since the controversy, the network's volume has dropped by 31%.

Arweave: An immutable decentralized storage network

Arweave serves as an immutable decentralized storage network, storing a wide range of data including web pages, gaming data, images, metadata for nonfungible tokens, and more. The Arweave blockchain currently stores around 74.26 pebibytes (83.6 million gigabytes) of data.