Unofficial Arweave fork plans spark community controversy
Iris, a prominent layer-2 network in the ArWave ecosystem, is suspected of planning to split the ArWave network with the intention of “dumping its data and restarting its token offering,” according to a report posted on December 17 by ArWave founder Sam Williams.
Despite a secure upgrade mechanism with Arwave, the Iris developers plan to proceed with a hard fork that “appears to be a game motivated by greed,” the lawsuit says. The founder of Arweave wrote:
“Given this situation, ArWave intends to remove Iris packets from trusted main ArWave gateways. This leads to significant delays before user data is available.”
In a disclaimer post the same day, Iris developers wrote, “Are we building a new provenance technology? He accused Arwave's developers of “active censorship” for attempting to “make Iris a platform from Arwave.” Developers added, “Stick with this space; We have a lot of powerful new features we're thinking about, and we can't wait to share them.
In the last two days, the Arweave token has lost more than 20% of its value and is now trading at $8.90, partly due to the disclosure of the lawsuit. Irys is currently the largest layer-2 network on Arwave, accounting for over 90% of the blockchain's 16 million daily transaction volume. But after the lawsuit came out, the network's volume dropped by 31 percent.
Related: NFTs, Games and Storage: The Key Filecoin and Arweave Storage Value?
As a static decentralized storage network, Arweave stores Web2 and Web3 data such as web pages, game data, images and metadata for non-volatile tokens and more. About 74.26 pebibytes (83.6 million gigabytes) of data are stored on the Arweave blockchain.
