In the Arweave ecosystem, Irys, a prominent layer 2 network, is purportedly planning a hard fork of the Arweave network. The alleged objective behind this fork is to "abandon the dataset and reset the token supply," as stated in a post made by Arweave founder Sam Williams on December 17.
Williams claimed that despite Arweave having a secure upgrade mechanism, Irys developers opted to proceed with the hard fork, a move Williams described as motivated by greed. To address this situation, Arweave intends to eliminate the Irys bundler from the trusted set of the main Arweave gateway, causing substantial delays in making user data available.
In response to these allegations, Irys developers posted a rebuttal on the same day. They affirmed their commitment to developing new Origin technology while accusing Arweave developers of engaging in "aggressive censorship." Furthermore, they hinted at considering numerous new features while expressing excitement about sharing these updates with the community.
The repercussions of these actions have impacted the Arweave token, which has experienced a more than 20% decline in value over the past 48 hours, currently trading at $8.90. This decline in value is partially attributed to the public disclosure of these allegations. Irys holds a significant position as the largest second-tier network on Arweave, being responsible for over 90% of the blockchain's 16 million daily transactions. However, since the allegations came to light, there has been a notable 31% decrease in traffic to the network.
Arweave, renowned for its immutable and decentralized storage network, serves as a platform for storing a wide array of Web2 and Web3 data, encompassing web pages, gaming data, images, metadata for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and more. The Arweave blockchain currently hosts an extensive 74.26 Pebibytes (equivalent to 83.6 million GB) of stored data.
