When the public storage chain becomes a digital coffin: How the Irys team made tens of millions of dollars with three PPTs

I. Team and Financing: A Fantastic Journey from "Fanboy" to "Traitor"

To discuss the Irys project, we must first start with its "magical realism" team composition. Founder Josh Benaron, a self-proclaimed "ten-year veteran of blockchain storage" and technical fanatic, has a career that reads like a "Game of Thrones" storyline - previously a loyal "fanboy" in the Arweave ecosystem, he later led a core technical team in a dramatic "Northern rebellion".

On December 18, 2023, Irys was planning to fork Arweave in a destructive manner, similar to public chains like Ethereum. Arweave focuses on permanent storage, and the data stored on it is far more important than protocol-recognized data. Therefore, a trade fork could easily lead to user data loss, ultimately causing the collapse of the "permanent storage" concept, which would be beneficial to neither party.

The most magical aspect of this team is that while they were eating from the Arweave ecosystem's table (contributing 82% of data uploads before 2023), they were determined to break their master's pot. According to their official statement, it was "pursuing censorship-free freedom", but everyone knows that when the packaging service provider Irys (formerly Bundlr) controls the ecosystem's lifeline, the fork is essentially a classic drama of "technical core team kidnapping investors".

This operation is like an employee stealing the boss's core technology and then opening a competing store with a "traditional brand" sign.

More ironically, this team, claiming to be "permanent storage guardians", exudes a temporary worker vibe even in their organizational structure.

Ecosystem Development Director Connor King's resume is like a "nomadic tribe" in the blockchain world - from open-source communities to DeFi protocols and storage tracks, wherever the wind blows, he waves the "ecosystem building" flag.

With such a "professional job-hopping athlete" leading the ecosystem, one can't help but wonder if Irys's long-term roadmap is about technological breakthroughs or just a fancy financing PPT.

Speaking of financing, it gets even more exciting. This project perfectly demonstrates what a "capital market harvesting machine" looks like: In May 2022, they raised $5.2 million while calling themselves "Arweave's best partner", and in June 2024, they received $3.7 million in strategic investment and declared independence, with institutions like OpenSea Ventures making "scattered coin" investments in between.

The most audacious move was when the founder Sam Williams went live on X platform to expose them during the 2024 fork announcement, and Irys immediately played the "user data autonomy" sympathy card - it's like a blockchain version of "Empresses in the Palace".

Although Filecoin has been criticized as a "scientist-exclusive chain" due to its complex proof mechanism, it at least clearly knows that it is earning money from enterprise-level cold storage. However, Irys wants to snatch Filecoin's enterprise customers while also eating Arweave's Non-Fungible Token storage dividends, ultimately becoming a "neither fish nor fowl" - trying to please developers with EVM compatibility, but ending up with smart contract gas fees more expensive than storage fees; attempting to attract C-end users with the permanent storage concept, but with an official website tutorial so complex it could make liberal arts students instantly despair.

Backstabbing Arweave: An Ethical Drama of Killing the Father and Marrying the Mother​​

This "storage world Oedipus Rex" drama is full of black humor: When Irys forked, it raised the "anti-censorship" banner, but its own node censorship rules are stricter than the original chain; claiming to optimize data accessibility, but its test network throughput is not even as high as Arweave's three years ago. More ironically, its core customers like Emet and AI Protocol X are all old users "seduced" from the Arweave ecosystem, a prime example of "soft rice eating" in the blockchain world.

V. Future Outlook: A Fantastic Journey from "Digital Coffin" to "Metaverse Graveyard"

Looking back at Irys's development trajectory from 2025, one would find it perfectly replicates the "lifecycle law" of blockchain projects:

• ​​Phase One (2021-2023): Clinging to Arweave's thigh, mixing into the ecosystem as a star during the Non-Fungible Token bull market with the "permanent storage" concept
• ​​Phase Two (2024): Riding the AI + blockchain trend, repackaging as a "programmable data chain" to deceive the second round of financing
• ​​Phase Three (2025): On the eve of token issuance, a triple hit of team internal strife, technical vulnerabilities, and miner strikes, splitting the community into "rights protection" and "faith" factions
• ​​Finale (2026+): Either being acquired as a storage module of a public chain or becoming a "blockchain archaeological site" on GitHub

The true value of this project might be contributing several classic failure cases to the industry:

1. Proving that playing "EVM compatibility" on the storage track is a false proposition (miners want stable storage returns, not smart contract fees)
2. Verifying that the "permanent storage economic model" is essentially an inter-period risk transfer game (betting on technology costs a hundred years from now with today's money)
3. Creating a new school of "PPT forking technique" (creating a new chain without changing the code)

So the next time you see a blockchain project integrating "permanent storage", "programmable data", and "full EVM compatibility", it is recommended to directly dial the leek harvesting hotline.

In the development of blockchain storage today, the vast majority of projects are fleeting - visible but intangible, impossible to catch up with, yet there are always people willing to pay for this mirage.