A fork is a split, and Irys, the leader of the Arweave ecosystem, is independent

“History repeats itself, "the first as tragedy, then as farce”

Escape: Irys Gateway is arrested for trying to escape

On December 18, Sam, the founder of Arweave, a permanent storage public chain, “previewed” the preparation of a fork of Irys, a bundle service product on it, and Irys then generously admitted that Arweave is open source software and Irys has the right to do so.

Interestingly, Sam’s “big flag” is that Irys violates the normal fork logic of Arweave, unlike public chains such as ETH, Arweave focuses on permanent storage, and the stored data on it is far more important than the consensus data of the protocol.

When the pros finished speaking, it was the turn of the opposing Irys. Irys, formerly known as Bundlr, is the most mainstream bundle service provider on top of Arweave, in short, the bundle service provider can package user data in batches to improve the user experience, and the overall operation principle is similar to Layer 2 such as OP.

The reason why Irys is running away is that there is an explicit, implicit censorship mechanism in Arweave. Contrary to what everyone thinks, Arweave is not completely “free of any content restrictions and upload restrictions”, some criminal, pornographic, and terrorist content may not be uploaded, and sensitive content such as politics may be censored in a way that is “visible in A and hidden in B place”.

Is it valid for Irys to fight back against Sam on this ground?

In fact, this is not necessarily the case, as long as any network is large enough and influential enough, whether it is Web2 or Web3 service providers, whether it is Eastern or Western, there will be some degree of moderation mechanism, and Irys, as Arweave’s most commonly used packaging service, will not fail to understand this.

But at the end of the day, censorship-resistant and forked agreements are both the banners of both sides, and the core is still a conflict of interest.

Split: A fateful showdown between the famous character and the boss

In the wake of the Irys incident, Sam “hand-picked” AR. IO can be used as an alternative to Irys, and it says that Forward Research (the original team of the Arweave Foundation) will also be working on a new packaged service product, in addition to everVision’s open source service, Arseeding.

But the seeds of division have been planted, and the root cause is that Irys feels that his efforts have not been rewarded, just like Dong Yuhui and New Oriental, Cao Yunjin and Guo Degang, the popular celebrities are inevitably unwilling to be workers, and turning over to be the boss is the pursuit, the difference is just to invest in the current company or set up another portal.

• Irys is a partner of Lens Protocol uploaded to Arweave, which costs only $500 for a million transactions and only $0.0005 for a single transaction.

• Irys is currently the most mainstream bundle (packaging service), the two nodes combined, this week’s data upload volume reached 581 GB, accounting for 82% of Arweave, and more than all other service providers combined, it can be said that Arweave and Irys are mutually successful.

• The market power of Arweave is weak, and there has been no explosion in the ecosystem for a long time. Contrary to what most people think, Arweave and Solana have had a partnership in the early days, but it seems that the market doesn’t know much about it, and other than that, the Arweave ecosystem has not had a real hit product for a long time (except for Bodhi, but this has nothing to do with Arweave core developers and projects).

Bundle - Statistics

In particular, the explosion of Bodhi shows that the Arweave ecosystem needs to look outward, give users more freedom, and help developers better buidl is the source of power to expand the so-called ecosystem.

Centralization: A small ecology, a big split

In 2020, I first read Liu Yi, the founder of Octopus Network, with his article “The Potential of Arweave is to Revive the Library of Alexandria, Not a FIL Replacement”, to establish a preliminary understanding of Arweave and agree with the view in the article that Arweave is not a cheap copy of FIL.

This has become more and more accepted over time, with both FVM and TON Storage’s new claims of permanent storage, but the Arweave network is still unique in terms of economic design.

In addition to the excellence of economics, the Arweave ecosystem has long been plagued by the founder’s words, which has been hinted at by the Arweave ecosystem KOL DMac. Sam himself may not have done it intentionally, but in practice, the Arweave token $AR is mostly locked up in the vault, subsidizing miners with linear releases for at least 200 years of storage guarantees.

According to the fork rules, Arweave is not opposed to forking itself, but it needs to follow the protocol evolution and fair fork principles mentioned by Sam, hoping to promote the organic growth of the new forked chain without harming the original chain.

The most critical of these is the incentive principle, and the following three factors need to be considered when determining the structure of rewards or expected expenses for a forked chain:

1. Reward plan: The proposal for the forked chain must specify the timeline for the rewards, i.e., when the relevant team members of the forked chain should receive the rewards;
2. Expenses: In addition to rewards, the forked chain usually lists the expected use of funds and the distribution ratio to ensure that there are stable funds during the initial period of the fork;
3. Utilization of Excess Tokens: A fair fork also requires a development that considers the use of excess tokens to advance the ecosystem.

The core principle is that it can be forked, but it is necessary to talk about martial virtues, hello, I am hello, everyone, but now Irys is going to fork Sam doesn’t think it’s good, so whether it’s good or not, it’s like people drinking water and knowing themselves!

Farce: The first time is a tragedy, the second is a farce

For a long time, there has been a famous saying by Jack Ma that employees leave for nothing more than two reasons, “the money is not enough, and they are wronged”, and now Irys is going to run away, Sam can predict it in advance, so the projects in the ecosystem will also act more cautiously.

Sam said that it can be forked, but it should be forked fairly, but the response is to officially name alternative projects and self-research, in the long run, there will only be licking dogs left in the ecology, and what can the seeds of freedom grow into after the freedom of wealth, if it grows into a centralized tree, although it can provide shade and rain, it will also lose its authenticity.

References:

Arweave is an Evolutionary Protocol

Fair Forks: Towards Incentivized Protocol Governance