Shipyard, the maintainer of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), will be winding down its engineering, maintenance, and infrastructure operations on September 30. This decision comes after Protocol Labs decided not to renew its funding for Shipyard.
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 Shipyard’s recent blog post.
IPFS is a well-known open-source protocol used for storing and sharing data through peer-to-peer networks. Protocol Labs, the organization behind IPFS and Filecoin, a blockchain network that incentivizes decentralized data storage, will be making decisions regarding the future of the associated infrastructure previously managed by Shipyard.
While Shipyard will no longer be operating public infrastructure like ipfs.io, dweb.link, delegated-ipfs.dev, and the IPFS bootstrap nodes, the IPFS protocol itself will remain operational. However, the absence of dedicated stewardship from Shipyard may impact various popular implementations and services unless new maintainers step in.
Going forward, IPFS will transition to a “lighter-weight stewardship” model through IPFS Foundation grants provided to individual maintainers, as mentioned by Molly Mackinlay, the engineering and research lead at Protocol Labs. Development will continue to focus on decentralized public infrastructure to support the IPFS ecosystem.
Established in 2024, Shipyard was formed by a group of experienced IPFS developers who had previously worked at Protocol Labs.
