Shipyard winds down IPFS work after Protocol Labs ends funding

InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) maintainer Shipyard will wind down its engineering, maintenance and infrastructure operations on Sept. 30 after Protocol Labs declined to renew its funding.

The funding loss will leave projects including Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop and IPFS Companion without dedicated maintainers, Shipyard said in a Monday blog post.

IPFS is an open-source protocol for storing and sharing data across peer-to-peer networks. Protocol Labs is a research and development organization that created IPFS and Filecoin, a blockchain network designed to incentivize decentralized data storage.

The engineering collective will cease operating public infrastructure, including ipfs.io, dweb.link, delegated-ipfs.dev and the IPFS bootstrap nodes. Protocol Labs owns the associated domains and infrastructure and will determine their future, according to Shipyard.

IPFS itself is not shutting down, but Shipyard’s wind-down removes dedicated stewardship from many popular implementations and services unless other maintainers take them over.

Protocol Labs engineering and research lead Molly Mackinlay said in an online forum discussion that IPFS would shift to “lighter-weight stewardship” through IPFS Foundation grants to individual maintainers. She added that development would continue on decentralized public infrastructure.

Shipyard was established in 2024 as an independent collective of longtime IPFS developers who previously worked at Protocol Labs.