GoKawiilThe end of IPFS at Shipyard
We have some difficult news to share with the IPFS and wider peer-to-peer community.
Protocol Labs has informed us that it will not be renewing Shipyard’s funding. While we’re grateful for the support and trust they have placed in us over the past two-plus years, we’re naturally disappointed by this outcome. As a direct result, Shipyard will be winding down its IPFS-related engineering, maintenance, and infrastructure operations. Our final day of our IPFS related work will be September 30, 2026.
Over the past three years, it has been our privilege to help shape the modern IPFS ecosystem and empower users with more resilient, self-sovereign technology. You can read more about the impactful work that we shipped in a follow-up post we’ll be sharing in the coming days, but some highlights include:
Delivering verifiable websites and downloads directly in the browser through inbrowser.link.
Re-architecting IPFS gateway infrastructure to handle approximately 3× more traffic while reducing operating and maintenance costs by around 80%.
Advancing HTTP-native approaches to IPFS that dramatically simplify deployment, development, and operating costs compared with traditional libp2p-based hosting.
Maintaining and improving many of the core implementations, libraries, and public infrastructure relied upon by the IPFS ecosystem every day.
We were excited about delivering the next chapter for IPFS: dramatically simpler HTTP-native implementations, resilient and sustainable content routing, support for large native SHA-256 objects, pseudonymous hosting and retrieval through Tor and onion services, and many other ideas we believed would make IPFS significantly easier to adopt. Unfortunately, we won’t have the opportunity to see those efforts through ourselves.
The practical implications extend well beyond Shipyard. Among other things:
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