Arweave's Bundlr Is Not Open-source (yet), Its CEO Explains Why

Bundlr, a project which scales Arweave uploads, is currently not open-sourced because it wants to protect what is being built, its Founder and CEO Josh Benaron said on Friday, revealing that it could open source when research and development is complete and it is decentralised.

Benaron disclosed during the eight episode of Arweave’s Voice held on Twitter that research and design could be completed by next year.

Bundlr makes uploading data on Arweave faster by taking transactions sent, bundling them and pushing them to the Arweave Network as one. Although bundles can contain a virtually unlimited number of transactions, they only count as one Arweave transaction in a transaction block.

In January this year, Bundlr demonstrated a sustained performance test at 50,000 transactions per second. It is said that the project processes millions of transactions daily.

We want to protect the things that we're creating, pre-decentralisation and then once all of our kind of, let's say, R&D (research and development) in the next year is done then we will be open sourcing as well once we decentralised, Benaron said.

The open source culture makes it possible for anyone to view the code, copy it, learn from it, alter it or share it. While some say making public source codes encourages rapid innovation, transparency and security, others argue that it fosters imitation and makes a project’s security vulnerability public.

Benaron told Permaweb News that Bundlr is closed-source because its code is still being developed.

...the code is very much "in development". When we reach the point where we can protocolise the service it absolutely makes sense to open-source it, he said on Saturday in a request for comment when asked for clarification about what he meant by ‘protect’.

Therefore, we are not kind of following all of the rules of a network currently…I also am very transparent that decentralisation is very important and we will be looking to decentralise soon, he said, pointing out that it will not be in the next three months. “I just mean it is like in the forefront of our brains.”

Permaweb reported in May 2022 that Benaron said during Bundlr’s bi-weekly Twitter space, ‘Into The Permaweb’ that he gets criticised “about the fact that we are not really decentralised right now”. He said at the time that Bundlr was “decentralised by design and centralised in practice in the sense that we run all the infrastructure”, noting that he is not aware of startups who built products fast while being decentralised.

While critics may hammer the project for not being decentralised, for Benaron, it seems that building a viable and successful product shares priority with being decentralised.

Indeed, going by figures and observations of the Arweave ecosystem by many, Bundlr’s solution has contributed to the growth and sustainability of the blockchain and the project remains a major player in the space.

Another reason why Bundlr is as popular as it is now is because we have, I would say, fairly good reputation in the sense that we like to provide guarantees to users, we’d like to be reliable and I am personally very focused on providing a scalable and reliable service to all of our users, Benaron said.