Shipyard, the maintainer of InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), will be winding down its engineering, maintenance, and infrastructure operations on September 30. This decision comes after Protocol Labs chose not to renew its funding.
As a result of the funding loss, projects such as Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop, and IPFS Companion will no longer have dedicated maintainers, according to a blog post by Shipyard on Monday.
IPFS is a decentralized protocol for storing and sharing data across peer-to-peer networks. Protocol Labs, the organization behind IPFS and Filecoin, will be taking over the public infrastructure previously managed by Shipyard, including domains like ipfs.io and dweb.link.
While Shipyard may be winding down, IPFS itself will continue to operate. However, the absence of dedicated stewardship from Shipyard may impact popular implementations and services unless new maintainers step in.
Molly Mackinlay, the engineering and research lead at Protocol Labs, mentioned in an online forum that IPFS will transition to a “lighter-weight stewardship” model through grants from the IPFS Foundation to individual maintainers. Development on decentralized public infrastructure will also continue.
Shipyard was founded in 2024 by a group of experienced IPFS developers who had previously worked at Protocol Labs.