Farewell to IPFS Operations at Shipyard

By Cameron Wood & Adin Schmahmann
Published: August 24, 2026 | ⏱️ 3 Min Read

We have some sobering news to communicate to the peer-to-peer community and those utilizing IPFS.

The Situation

Protocol Labs has notified us that they will not be renewing the funding for Shipyard. While we are deeply appreciative of the trust and support provided to us over the last two-plus years, we are naturally saddened by this decision.

Consequently, Shipyard is beginning the process of winding down all infrastructure operations, maintenance, and engineering related to IPFS.

The Hard Deadline: Our final day of IPFS-related activity will be September 30, 2026.

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Reflecting on Our Impact

For three years, we've had the honor of evolving the IPFS ecosystem to create more self-sovereign and resilient tech. We will share a detailed retrospective soon, but here are the primary milestones:

• Browser Integration: Launched inbrowser.link to enable verifiable downloads and websites directly within the browser.
• Infrastructure Efficiency: We overhauled gateway architecture to optimize performance.
  • Traffic Capacity: $\text{Traffic} \times 3$
  • Operational Costs: $\text{Cost} \times 0.20$ (an $80\%$ reduction).
• HTTP-Native Evolution: Developed approaches to IPFS that are native to HTTP, making deployment and operation significantly cheaper and simpler than the standard libp2p hosting.
• Core Stewardship: Provided ongoing maintenance for the essential libraries and public infrastructure that power the daily IPFS experience.

The Roadmap That Won't Be

We had a vision for the "next chapter" of IPFS, but unfortunately, we will not be the ones to implement it:

Dramatically simpler HTTP-native implementations Sustainable and resilient content routing Native support for large SHA-256 objects Pseudonymous retrieval/hosting via Tor and .onion services

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What This Means for the Ecosystem

The cessation of our work has immediate implications for several projects and services.

🛠️ Software & Maintenance

The following projects will no longer have dedicated Shipyard engineers for bug fixes, new features, or general stewardship:

Additionally, all Shipyard contributions to upstream libraries like go-libp2p and js-libp2p will stop, as will our involvement in ecosystem coordination and specification standards.

🌐 Public Infrastructure

Shipyard will stop operating the following services:

• ipfs.io & dweb.link
• check.ipfs.network & delegated-ipfs.dev
• IPFS bootstrap nodes
• Collaborative clusters (e.g., Wikipedia-on-IPFS)

Note: Since Protocol Labs owns the associated domains and infrastructure, they will decide the future of these assets.

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The Transition Plan

Our priority is to ensure the ecosystem is stable for whatever comes next.

• Provide context and answers to stakeholders.
• Assist infrastructure operators in transitioning.
• Hand over documentation for maintained software.
• Finalize all remaining commitments by Sept 30.

If you rely on Shipyard's work or operate related infrastructure, please reach out. We want to make this handover as seamless as possible.

# Symbolic representation of the wind-down
$ shutdown -h now "Shipyard IPFS Operations"
# System halted.

"To everyone who wrote code, reviewed PRs, ran nodes, or simply believed that content should be addressed by what it is rather than where it is: Thank you."

We are proud of our contributions and hope they serve as a sturdy foundation for the future of the decentralized web.

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📚 Related Reading

• A Post Gateway World: Transitioning Users to Direct Retrieval with IPFS (July 23, 2025)
• Gateway Updates: Public Gateways are Redirecting to inbrowser.link (May 11, 2026)
• Web3 Stability: Keep Web3 Online (Serving 75M+ monthly users)