Shipyard winds down IPFS work as Protocol Labs ends funding

The engineering collective responsible for keeping core IPFS infrastructure running just got its pink slip. Shipyard, the independent group that has maintained key implementations of the InterPlanetary File System since early 2024, announced that Protocol Labs will not renew its funding, effectively ending all IPFS-related work by September 30, 2026.

The decision leaves a string of widely used open-source projects, including Kubo, Helia, Boxo, and Rainbow, without dedicated maintainers. Protocol Labs, the original creator of IPFS, will take back operational control of critical public services like ipfs.io and dweb.link.

What Shipyard actually did

Shipyard was formed in early 2024 after Protocol Labs made a deliberate push to decentralize the governance of IPFS and its networking layer, libp2p. The idea was straightforward: hand operational responsibility to an independent collective so the protocol’s maintenance wouldn’t depend on a single corporate entity’s priorities.

During its roughly two-year run, the collective delivered measurable results. Gateway traffic capacity increased by approximately 300%, while operating costs were slashed by around 80%.

Shipyard also managed the transition of libp2p maintenance to community contributors, a process that wrapped up by September 2025. Protocol Labs is now pivoting toward lighter individual maintainer grants instead of funding a collective entity.

Why this matters for decentralized storage

IPFS is not shutting down. The protocol itself is an open standard that anyone can implement and run. The specific software implementations that most developers and applications actually use, the ones Shipyard maintained, are now entering a period of uncertain stewardship.

Kubo is the reference implementation of IPFS, the version most node operators run. Helia is the JavaScript implementation that browser-based and Node.js applications rely on. Boxo provides reusable IPFS building blocks for Go developers.

The governance paradox

There is a certain irony in what happened here. Protocol Labs created Shipyard specifically to avoid the scenario where IPFS maintenance depended on a single organization’s budget decisions. Two years later, a single organization’s budget decision is exactly what killed the arrangement.

The libp2p transition offers a partial template. That networking library was handed off to community maintainers by September 2025. For the Filecoin ecosystem specifically, Filecoin’s storage network relies on IPFS addressing for content retrieval, and any degradation in IPFS tooling could create friction for Filecoin-based applications.

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