Members of Arweave Ecosystem Pitch Tents Amidst Scuffle Between Arweave And Irys
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Author: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Reviewer: Henry @ Contributor of PermaDAO
The fracas between Sam Williams, the founder of the Arweave Protocol and CEO of Forward Research and Irys, a project in the ecosystem over the latter’s alleged decision to fork the protocol in a method that is against the laid down standard, has resulted in varying reactions from the ecosystem.
The Arweave ecosystem woke up to a post on X by Williams lashing out at Irys over the latter’s move to fork Arweave in an “anti-social” way motivated by greed. Williams added that Irys intends drop the Arweave dataset and reset the token supply which goes against protocol evolution, which is an established way a fork is expected to happen.
“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,” Williams said.
Irys, in response to Williams neither confirmed not denied that it was planning to fork Arweave. It only said it would not take away the choice about where data is stored from users.
Indeed, Williams is a founder who commands some respect in the Arweave ecosystem and his words, whether an affirmation or otherwise, hold some weight and could influence behaviour.
A few members of the Arweave ecosystem seem to support Irys and opined that Williams may be hasty in taking actions that would make uploads to the Arweave Protocol from Irys slower. Irys may be at the receiving end of a boycotting of its service following Williams post suggesting that Irys could no longer be trusted and called for users to switch everVision’s Arseeding technology or ar.io network.
This move could be devastating to Irys who recently rebranded and ascribed to itself the “only provenance layer” that does what Ethereum and Bitcoin fail at. Irys’s provenance layer promises permanence of data, precision and uncertainty. Arweave plays a part in helping Irys achieve the provenance technology.
In the last few months, some projects had integrated Irys to aid their operations, at least one has said it would hold off on it. It is not clear as of the time of writing what projects like Solana Mobile, Context, deBridge Finance and Immutable would do.
In the wake of the scuffle between Arweave and Irys, KYVE’s Founder Fabian Riewe, told this reporter that the data validation and distribution protocol who only last week announced it had integrated Irys, was standing with Arweave.
“We were not aware of any of this going on. I can already say that if the plans from the Irys team to fork Arweave are true, as they are described in Sam’s tweet, we will, without doubt stand with Arweave and make sure to stay there. But I will make sure to assess the situation as thoroughly as i can with my team and will make sure this is getting correctly communicated and implemented with our community,” Fabian Riewe told this reporter.
On Monday, KYVE announced that it was not siding with neither Arweave nor Irys. It said it would abide by what was best for KYVE’s technological development and safeguarding of the protocol’s integrity.
KYVE will be temporarily migrating from Irys and adding support for the Turbo open source Arweave bundling nodes. It said using Turbo removes the risk of relying on a third party bundling service. It blames the possibility that files uploaded by Irys may not be available in the optimistics cache hosted by Arweave. KYVE also said it was looking to spin up a community-native bundling node.
For DMac, a member of the Arweave ecosystem, Williams may be hasty in his decisions and doing what puts every project in the ecosystem in a public relations mess. He also complained that Williams was funneling “users from a service the majority prefer to one very few prefer. Then justify this preemptive action by claiming the ecosystem project was about to do the same”. DMac’s post suggests he is pitching his tent with Irys.
“A very real thing that Sam doesn't seem to realize, is that by creating a PR nightmare in the Arweave ecosystem he also creates a PR nightmare for every project building in the ecosystem. Picking a zero-sum fight with an ecosystem project he forces every founder and team that relies on that project to navigate the same PR disaster and justify their position to their users, investors, and stakeholders. Such a waste,” DMac said.
Abhav, Arweave’s chief of staff, hinted that Williams would not let go easily because a lot of work went into building “the mechanism underlying Arweave in order to create uncensorable information, it appears that Iris (sic) has no idea what they’re in for.”
For RareWeave, a non-fungible token marketplace built on Arweave, it is showing support for Arweave.
Gerry, the chief marketing officer of everVision noted that the situation was disappointing because Irys is an important member of the ecosystem. He reiterated that ar.io and everVision were alternatives but “it’s still not enough for the prosperity of the ecosystem. We need more ecosystem builders to join in.”
Mouse, the founder of Rareweave is calling for peace and warned against actions that are negative for Arweave.
“Would be crazy if bundlr would just literally rug users like that. On the other hand, if bundlr wasn't gonna do that, then Sam seems to be paranoid and derailing eco project. Bring the peace until arweave went off rails, settle this thing, it's not too late. We don't need drama,” Mouse said.
Polarzero observed that Irys changed negatively when it rebranded.
“Seriously, did anyone else feel that after Bundlr rebranded to @irys_xyz, it brutally started looking either like they were hacked, or like their communication was run by a 12yo kid? Aggressive change in communication, targeting airdrop farmers, and the whole focus on the branding when before they were solely focusing (and delivering) on the tech…It did feel wrong, and I guess it did rightly so,” Polarzero stated.
The co-founder of Meson Sherlock Shi reminded that in crypto, forking was allowed and cautioned that users’ right must be prioritized.
Fair Protocol on its part has taken sides with Williams. The project said it would discontinue support for Irys and had changed its code to use the bundling services of ar.io Network. It also said it plans to continue using ar.io for the foreseeable future.
The Co-founder of Spheron, Prashant Maurya said he was not surprised about the situation and further said that forking was inevitable and if chain dependency on one app is more than 90 percent, it’s not a good signal. He noted that the brawl between Irys and Arweave would not affect Spheron as it uses its own infrastructure.
Molecular Execution Machine (MEM) has also dropped support for Irys. It is now migrating to up.arweave.net. MEM’s parent company, Decentland Labs would also discontinue support for Irys. Its Chief Technology Officer, Darwin stated that the decision was based on the fork not being done right.
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