Forking is nothing new, but many projects have debated how to fork. This kind of controversy has also come to the old decentralized data storage protocol Arweave today.

On December 18, Arweave founder Sam Williams (@samecwilliams) on social mediaPost a messageIt said that according to reliable sources, Arweave ecological Web3 storage solution Irys (formerly Bundlr Network) is considering forking Arweave in an unsafe and anti-community form.

Behind this, the reason why the Irys fork is not supported by Sam is that it hopes to fork in a way that harms rather than helps the Arweave ecosystem.

Arweave founder: Iryss forking method is anti-community and the project team is too greedy and short-sighted

Arweave and Irys, who are on both sides of the dispute this time, are both players on the decentralized storage track.

Among them, Arweave is a decentralized data storage protocol based on blockweave technology. The main network was launched in June 2018. It usesBlockWeaveThe data structure and SPoRAs consensus mechanism provide new solutions to the problem of permanent storage. Arweaves one-time payment and lifetime use format also solves the cumbersome process of users needing to continuously subscribe. Arweave also promised to provide users with storage services for at least 200 years.

Irys (previously the project name was Bundlr Network) is one of the leading projects in the Arweave ecosystem. It has always been called Arweave’s extension solution and processed more than 10,000,000 transactions in the first month of its launch. Arweave only processed 1, 000, 000 transactions. It is reported that Irys handles about 95% of Arweave transactions. When it was renamed from Bundlr Network to Irys in October this year, Irys stated that it had completed more than 1 billion transactions.

According to CoinGecko data, after Arweave founder Sam Williams published the article, the price of Arweave token AR dropped slightly, falling by 0.6% in 1 hour and 12.3% in 24 hours, and was quoted at US$9.28 as of press time.

In Sams long article, there are four key points worth noting.

First, about the correct way to fork Arweave.

For a persistent storage network, forks need to be done the right way: retaining and building state, rather than destroying it. When forked in this way, they enable the network to continuously improve itself and resolve issues over time, keeping data sets secure. When forks dont happen in this way, they wont achieve information permanence - because all data will be deleted regularly.

This system allows forks to compete and improve the protocol in a pro-social way: datasets remain secure, creating a market for new ideas, and rewarding innovators. It also allows token holders to accumulate a range of tokens in a set of forks of the network, or actively trade those tokens if they deem a fork to be preferable: “It’s a win-win for everyone.”

The Arweave network itself has a process called protocol evolutionEstablish a mechanism, which allows projects to safely fork and upgrade the network.

Second, regarding the way Irys chose to fork.

Instead of doing the fork properly, Irys intends to delete the data set and reset the token supply, which Sam believes seems to be motivated by greed because users have placed their trust in Irys and uploaded the data to Arweave: There are pro-social and anti-community ways to fork, and Irys is pursuing an anti-community way to fork Arweave.”

Sam also pointed out that after communicating with Irys, Irys said they didnt want to support existing data and issue tokens to a bunch of assholes. Sam defines Irys move as greedy and says this approach short-sightedly hinders the development of their own permanent storage project. No fork can succeed in the long term if the data set and token supply are constantly being reset.

We still hope they come to their senses and build their forks the right way. If their experiments help the ecosystem, we are always willing to communicate and support.

Third, about how Irys users solve problems.

Since Irys may stop uploading user data to Arweave at any time, Arweave points out that there is a new, completely free and 100% compatible with Irys to protect user rights.bundler, Irys users only need to replace the nodes URL with this URL to use it.

Fourth, on how Arweave fights back.

If Irys is not going to be forked the right way, Arweave plans to remove the Irys bundler from the main Arweave gateway, but this will cause significant network delays before user data is available. Therefore, Arweave will also organize an X Space soon to respond to more follow-up processing.

Irys responds: Arweave founder’s actions are “disappointing” and a “tragic irony”

In response, Irys quickly posted a post on social media in response, saying that Sams behavior was a tragic irony. As someone who works to build technology that can protect humanity from tyranny, its really disappointing to see him act like a tyrant and try to remove Irys from Arweave, a software that aims to be open source and permissionless. .

At the same time, Irys pointed out that it has never and will never take away users choice about where their data is stored, and has always been committed to censorship-resistant, open source and permissionless technology: If users are unable to retrieve it due to Arweaves active censorship, data, users can point applications to Irys-hostedgatewaymiddle.

In addition, Irys also said that he is developing new traceability technology and is considering many powerful new features.

Community: Sam accusing Irys is like Vitalik suing L2

For this incident, Framework Ventures co-founded Vance Spencer (@pythianism）Post a messageComments said: Sam threatened to sue the middleware that supports 90% of the Arweave network. Imagine Vitalik suing L2.

But in general, Irys did not respond positively to the issue of the fork method raised by Sam, which also aroused doubts from the community. Many users pointed out that they hoped Irys would respond positively to the issues related to the fork.

Behind this fork farce, how will Arweave and Irys end up? BlockBeats will also be watching.