As of December 17, Irys, a prominent layer 2 network within the Arweave ecosystem, is reportedly planning to fork the Arweave network with the intention of “deleting its data sets and resetting the token supply.” post This is the work of Arweave founder Sam Williams.
He claims that despite Arweave having a secure upgrade mechanism, Irys developers are planning to proceed with a hard fork, which “appears to be a play motivated by greed.” Arweave founder wrote:
“In light of this situation, Arweave plans to remove Irys Bundler from the trusted set of major Arweave gateways. This will result in significant delays before user data becomes available.”
In the rebuttal post On the same day, Irys developers asked, “Are we developing new provenance technology? We really do, accusing Arweave developers of “active censorship” in their efforts to “de-platform Irys from Arweave.” “Keep watching this space,” the developers said. We’re considering many powerful new features and can’t wait to share them.”
Over the past two days, Arweave tokens have lost more than 20% of their value, in part due to the disclosure of the allegations, and are currently trading at $8.90. Irys is currently the largest layer 2 network on Arweave, accounting for over 90% of the blockchain’s 16 million daily transaction volumes. However, since the suspicions arose, the size of the network has decreased by 31%.
Related: NFTs, Gaming, and Storage: What’s the Key to Filecoin and Arweave’s Value Creation?
Arweave, an immutable, decentralized storage network, stores Web2 and Web3 data such as web pages, game data, images and metadata for non-fungible tokens, and more. Approximately 74.26 febibytes (83.6 million gigabytes) of data are stored on the Arweave blockchain.