On July 14th 2026, Julian Chandra — now-former CEO of Odysee — posted this1:
I know most aren’t privy to the intricacies of C-level parlance, but generally when you step down from your position, you have a replacement lined up, you usher them in, and you talk the company up.
What is not common for execs who have faith in the continued success of the company is for them to write something like:
I’d be doing the community a major disservice if I didn’t say plainly that […] the path ahead looks very bleak.
That says something like “I’m abandoning this ship”.
As a core member of a community whose publishing revolves around Odysee, I do not enjoy seeing preemptive eulogies on my timeline.
Is Odysee Dying?
I don’t know.
It’s complicated.
Some background: Odysee was bought a while back by Forward Research after SEC litigation with LBRY hit the floor. Forward’s goal was simple: LBRY died as a chain in terms of popularity and relevance, so they wanted to move it over to Arweave2.
From what I can tell, that project was going “okay” up until recently. Funding from Forward is now in question, and the Arweave move is in jeopardy.
My guess is that Julian no longer has any faith in it. Which isn’t good.
Odysee’s future is now uncertain and unsteady. There is enough risk in banking on its sturdiness that we should consider resilience.
What Do We Do?
The best time to make backups was yesterday, the second best time is today, and the worst time is when you realize you need them.
I haven’t been sitting on my hands for weeks on end. You may’ve seen me post about recruiting a closed seed pool for a liferaft:
That raft is afloat. As of this article, we now have infrastructure to not only ensure that all of guncad is mirrored from Odysee to torrents, but that you can stay up-to-date via RSS, ensuring resilience over time.
Torrents on GunCAD Index
If you’re reading this, torrents offered by that mirroring effort are now live. You can find them all over the website. Please seed them to ensure they stay available.
These torrents are verified by GunCAD Index to be identical to the files you would get from Odysee3.
If you would like to help contribute to the seed pool in bulk, click “Seed the Index” on the frontpage:
That’ll bring up a small modal that’ll guide you through the process. Reach out if you have questions that the guide can’t answer.
So GunCAD Index Offers Downloads Now?
No.
GunCAD Index still does not distribute any gun design files. It does not participate in the seeder pool, it does not participate in mirroring, and this will not change for the foreseeable future.
Contributions for torrents come from a very small closed pool of submitters and are independently-verified on the Index side.
It is very important to me that not only are files owned by the community, but that they are served independently of the index used to find them.
Why Not LBRY?
Why torrents? Wasn’t LBRY supposed to handle this? Why’d we use the funny blockchain thing that was supposed to solve this single-point-of-failure problem if it doesn’t do that?
-You, probably
The short answer is that the SEC killed all aspirations of that when they grabbed LBRY’s dick and twisted it. It was just kinda hard to tell at the time.
Several LBRY features rely on Odysee to function because community support is so spotty:
Almost all tools are pointed at Odysee services4
Donating disk space is needlessly difficult and takes special software
Nobody mines the coin5
In theory, one could recruit a bunch of miners and run all this infrastructure, but the bottom line is that Odysee is proving in realtime that that’s not a sustainable business venture.
Torrents, instead, are very boring and have been proven to work over decades.
Where Will We Go if Odysee Dies?
Backups are well and good, but that doesn’t solve publication.
This does:
If Odysee ever goes under and we don’t have a new hosting platform lined up, the Index will start taking native torrent submissions. Pitfalls to this will be discussed if they’re ever relevant.
In the event that we do all agree on a new service to use, I’ll wire support for it up to the Index instead.
How Can I Help?
There are a lot of ways you can help with this backup effort:
Do not abandon Odysee. Releases posted there will continue to be backed up for you automatically. There is currently no better platform, and if ever there were a time they’d need support, it’d be now.
If you are a designer, sign up for an account on GunCAD Index and claim your channel. If Odysee ever dies, I’m not gonna have any way to figure out who’s really who post-facto. The account verification process currently proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re you. Go do that now.
If you have disk space and bandwidth, seed the Index. There’s a big button on the frontpage. If you’re limited on disk space, pick a search query you like (verified:true is a good one) and seed just that one query instead. Make sure your client is subscribed to the RSS feed, otherwise you could slowly drift out of sync from the index and leave gaps in coverage.
If you don’t already know how to, figure out how to use a torrent client. I suggest qBittorrent. It’s not hard, it’s documented in a billion places.
And most importantly:
Print a fucking gun. Show people that they’re cool and safe and can do things that normal gun manufacturers are too scared to do. Show off printed cans and fun cheap stocks and shit that you own top-to-bottom. In a future where we own nothing, making is everything.
Apparently Substack auto-inserts em-dashes on double short-dash. Rest assured this article was written entirely by hand by a real person.
New crypto hotness.
All torrents are verified to be SHA384-identical to files obtained from LBRY. In fact, independent beta GunCAD Mirror instances downloading the same file will deterministically arrive at the same BTIHv1, which we use as part of verification.
Wallet servers, DHT bootstrap, SPV, stuff like that.
This has several knock-on effects like publication latency and vulnerability to 51% attacks against the ledger. We should not use a coin whose public state could be corrupted for $80 in AWS compute.