Irys, a key layer-2 network within the Arweave ecosystem, reportedly plans to fork the Arweave network, aiming to drop the dataset and reset the token supply, as per a statement from Arweave founder Sam Williams on Dec. 17. Williams claims that despite the presence of a secure upgrade method within Arweave, Irys developers intend to proceed with a hard fork, which he sees as a move driven by financial motives. Williams 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 response, Irys developers released a rebuttal on the same day, asserting, “Are we developing new provenance technology? You bet your ass we are,” accusing Arweave developers of active censorship for alleged attempts to deplatform Irys from Arweave. They also 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.”
Over the past 48 hours, the Arweave token has experienced a decrease of more than 20% in its value, currently trading at $8.90, partly due to the emergence of these allegations. Irys, currently the largest layer-2 network on Arweave, constitutes more than 90% of the blockchain’s 16 million daily transaction volumes. However, the network’s volume has decreased by 31% following the allegations.
Arweave, functioning as an immutable decentralized storage network, holds Web2 and Web3 data, encompassing web pages, gaming data, images, metadata for nonfungible tokens, and more. Approximately 74.26 pebibytes (83.6 million gigabytes) of data are stored on the Arweave blockchain.
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