IPFS was supposed to be the layer that outlived any single company. Turns out the maintainers of Kubo, Helia, and Boxo, plus the public gateways and bootstrap nodes everyone quietly leans on, all sat on one funder’s line item. Protocol Labs declined to renew Shipyard’s funding, and the whole stack loses its stewards by the end of September.
My move: audit everything I self-host that touches ipfs.io or dweb.link and swap in my own node before September 30. Pin what matters locally, stop hardcoding gateway URLs I don’t run. The lesson for anyone building on “decentralized” anything: the protocol can be distributed while the payroll is a single point of failure.
The story — Shipyard announced that Protocol Labs will not renew its funding, so it is winding down all IPFS engineering, maintenance, and infrastructure work by September 30, 2026. Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop, and other projects lose dedicated maintainers; contributions to go-libp2p and js-libp2p cease; Shipyard stops operating public infrastructure including ipfs.io, dweb.link, the bootstrap nodes, and Wikipedia-on-IPFS, with domain owner Protocol Labs deciding their future. The team remains available through September to help transitions. (Source)