06.10.2022
in-depthDecentralizationTechnical Basics
in-depthDecentralizationTechnical Basics
Main
- IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a communication protocol for creating a distributed file system, designed to replace the existing HTTP Internet protocol. Content hosted on IPFS is not stored on a single server, but on multiple nodes.
- IPFS is an important infrastructure solution for Web3 that allows decentralized data storage in various decentralized applications, including NFT, GameFi, DeFi.
- In the future, IPFS can completely change the way data is stored and accessed on the network, solving the problem of censorship and the monopoly of popular cloud platforms provided by Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft and other tech giants.
How IPFS differs from HTTP
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System, “Interplanetary File System”) is hypermedia an open-source communication protocol by which computer nodes store and distribute data in a single distributed file system.
The key difference between IPFS and the existing HTTP Internet protocol is that data is accessed not by the location of the site, but directly by the address of its content (file, document, image, folder).
The structure of data storage in IPFS is decentralized, which solves the problem of censorship. The author of the solution is the founder and head of the American startup Protocol Labs Juan Benet – called IPFS “the distributed persistent web”, meaning that the site hosted in the system can never be closed by anyone.
“In a way, IPFS is like the Internet, but IPFS can be thought of as a single BitTorrent swarm exchanging objects in a single Git repository. In other words, IPFS introduces a high-performance block storage model with content-addressed hyperlinks,” he explained in white paper project.
In IPFS, addresses point to files or data obtained from the contents of the file itself or data using hashing. This means that the content of websites on the IPFS network can be moved and accessed in a decentralized way on a peer-to-peer network.
In simple words, IPFS is an analogue of a torrent tracker, in which a number of nodes (computers) freely share the files stored on them, thus distributing them throughout the network with the possibility of obtaining free access.
In this way, IPFS solves the problems of HTTP, which routes all traffic through centralized servers, which leads to additional costs and the risk of mass outages due to server problems. The IPFS network allows nodes to download and transfer files not only from one server, as implemented in HTTP, but from many nodes at the same time. When a user on the IPFS network requests a file, the IPFS network finds nodes that have the required hashes and retrieves the data.
Who and when developed IPFS
The founder of the American company Protocol Labs, Juan Benet, became the author of IPFS. Publication technical documentation new file system took place in July 2014.
First protocol release took place in February 2014. The first major site in September 2015 using distributed web IPFS, became free web hosting Neocitieswhich allows you to create mini-sites on its platform.
The next important moment in the history of IPFS development was the $257 million Filecoin ICO. The sale of tokens took place on the Coinlist platform, which was founded by Protocol Labs together with AngelList. How noted then the developers, the goal of Filecoin was to create economic incentives for users of IPFS with the help of cryptocurrency.
In June 2019, Protocol Labs organized first IPFS– an event in Barcelona, which resulted in cooperation with Netflix as well as Opera, Microsoft And cloudflare.
An equally important event was the launch of the Filecoin mainnet in October 2020. According to the Protocol Labs team, this created an IPFS adoption layer with built-in economic incentives.
How IPFS works – detailed explanation
When content is uploaded to IPFS, the address for accessing an object, file, or user data in the system is formed with reference not to the server address, which is an IP address, but to its unique Content Identifier (CID) cryptographic hash identifier.
When a file is reloaded, the CID does not change, but the updated versions of the file are assigned new hash identifiers. To access an earlier version of the file, the InterPlanetary Naming System (IPNS) naming service is used – an analogue of DNS registry.
IPFS files larger than 256 KB are split into parts, hashed and organized into IPLD objects (InterPlanetary Linked Data). IPLD consists of two components: the data itself and links to parts of the file, interconnected through a directed acyclic Merkle tree graph (Merkle DAG).
Then a special program IPFS-daemon (IPFS daemon), which is responsible for communications in the system, comes into play. It temporarily caches data, or, at the user’s choice, “attaches” it to itself and distributes it to other nodes upon request. In the future, such nodes can act as content providers or remain content recipients.
After requesting content in the distributed hash table (Distributed Hash Table, DHT) of the system, the nodes nearest to the user are searched for with a copy of the data being sought. They give parts of the file.
Where IPFS is used
According to BuiltWith service statistics, as of October 5, 2022, about 6,500 sites around the world use IPFS. Of these, just under a third are located in the United States. This list includes decentralized exchange Uniswap, decentralized application data service Dapp Radar, and cryptocurrency startup platform DAO Maker.
The first web resource with IPFS support in 2015 was the Neocities hosting service. The largest network service provider Cloudflare started using IPFS in 2018 and launched own gateway in the system in 2022. In March 2020, the Opera browser provided access to the decentralized resources of the Unstoppable Domains provider by placing content on IPFS. In early 2021, the protocol integrated the Brave crypto browser.
IPFS technology began to be used as a response to censorship by regulators. First example loading has become in IPFS Turkish version of Wikipedia. In the spring of 2019, in response to Assange’s arrest, activists uploaded the WikiLeaks archive to IPFS.
IPFS is also used to store code. This is practiced, for example, by the Uniswap decentralized exchange team, which places in IPFS.
IPFS also acts as an important infrastructure layer of Web3, supporting the operation of NFT projects, decentralized applications and other resources. There are special companies that provide file management services in IPFS. For example, the Pinata platform allows you to monetize media files for NFTs issued on various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Algorand.
How to open an IPFS link
Many popular browsers such as Opera and Brave have already added native support for IPFS links. This means that you will be able to open sites in the specified browsers through an address with the ipfs:// prefix, for example:
ipfs://bafybeiaysi4s6lnjev27ln5icwm6tueaw2vdykrtjkwiphwekaywqhcjze/wiki/
However, this link will not open in Google Chrome. Instead, to access the resource, you will have to use the existing HTTPS protocol along with the address of the site where the file is stored, for example:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafybeiaysi4s6lnjev27ln5icwm6tueaw2vdykrtjkwiphwekaywqhcjze/wiki/
To directly open IPFS links in Google Chrome, you will need to install a special extension IPFS Companion. For the extension to work correctly, the developers recommend installing your own IPFS node on your computer. To do this, you need to go to the section IPFS Desktop on the IPFS official website and follow the simple instructions after selecting the appropriate platform: Windows, macOS or Ubuntu.
The Protocol Labs team also took care of the owners of domains and sites planning to transfer their web resources to IPFS. A special Fleek download servicewhich allows you to transfer and set up sites without having to install anything on your computer and deal with the command line or code.
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06.10.2022
in-depthDecentralizationTechnical Basics
in-depthDecentralizationTechnical Basics
Main
- IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a communication protocol for creating a distributed file system, designed to replace the existing HTTP Internet protocol. Content hosted on IPFS is not stored on a single server, but on multiple nodes.
- IPFS is an important infrastructure solution for Web3 that allows decentralized data storage in various decentralized applications, including NFT, GameFi, DeFi.
- In the future, IPFS can completely change the way data is stored and accessed on the network, solving the problem of censorship and the monopoly of popular cloud platforms provided by Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft and other tech giants.
How IPFS differs from HTTP
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System, “Interplanetary File System”) is hypermedia an open-source communication protocol by which computer nodes store and distribute data in a single distributed file system.
The key difference between IPFS and the existing HTTP Internet protocol is that data is accessed not by the location of the site, but directly by the address of its content (file, document, image, folder).
The structure of data storage in IPFS is decentralized, which solves the problem of censorship. The author of the solution is the founder and head of the American startup Protocol Labs Juan Benet – called IPFS “the distributed persistent web”, meaning that the site hosted in the system can never be closed by anyone.
“In a way, IPFS is like the Internet, but IPFS can be thought of as a single BitTorrent swarm exchanging objects in a single Git repository. In other words, IPFS introduces a high-performance block storage model with content-addressed hyperlinks,” he explained in white paper project.
In IPFS, addresses point to files or data obtained from the contents of the file itself or data using hashing. This means that the content of websites on the IPFS network can be moved and accessed in a decentralized way on a peer-to-peer network.
In simple words, IPFS is an analogue of a torrent tracker, in which a number of nodes (computers) freely share the files stored on them, thus distributing them throughout the network with the possibility of obtaining free access.
In this way, IPFS solves the problems of HTTP, which routes all traffic through centralized servers, which leads to additional costs and the risk of mass outages due to server problems. The IPFS network allows nodes to download and transfer files not only from one server, as implemented in HTTP, but from many nodes at the same time. When a user on the IPFS network requests a file, the IPFS network finds nodes that have the required hashes and retrieves the data.
Who and when developed IPFS
The founder of the American company Protocol Labs, Juan Benet, became the author of IPFS. Publication technical documentation new file system took place in July 2014.
First protocol release took place in February 2014. The first major site in September 2015 using distributed web IPFS, became free web hosting Neocitieswhich allows you to create mini-sites on its platform.
The next important moment in the history of IPFS development was the $257 million Filecoin ICO. The sale of tokens took place on the Coinlist platform, which was founded by Protocol Labs together with AngelList. How noted then the developers, the goal of Filecoin was to create economic incentives for users of IPFS with the help of cryptocurrency.
In June 2019, Protocol Labs organized first IPFS– an event in Barcelona, which resulted in cooperation with Netflix as well as Opera, Microsoft And cloudflare.
An equally important event was the launch of the Filecoin mainnet in October 2020. According to the Protocol Labs team, this created an IPFS adoption layer with built-in economic incentives.
How IPFS works – detailed explanation
When content is uploaded to IPFS, the address for accessing an object, file, or user data in the system is formed with reference not to the server address, which is an IP address, but to its unique Content Identifier (CID) cryptographic hash identifier.
When a file is reloaded, the CID does not change, but the updated versions of the file are assigned new hash identifiers. To access an earlier version of the file, the InterPlanetary Naming System (IPNS) naming service is used – an analogue of DNS registry.
IPFS files larger than 256 KB are split into parts, hashed and organized into IPLD objects (InterPlanetary Linked Data). IPLD consists of two components: the data itself and links to parts of the file, interconnected through a directed acyclic Merkle tree graph (Merkle DAG).
Then a special program IPFS-daemon (IPFS daemon), which is responsible for communications in the system, comes into play. It temporarily caches data, or, at the user’s choice, “attaches” it to itself and distributes it to other nodes upon request. In the future, such nodes can act as content providers or remain content recipients.
After requesting content in the distributed hash table (Distributed Hash Table, DHT) of the system, the nodes nearest to the user are searched for with a copy of the data being sought. They give parts of the file.
Where IPFS is used
According to BuiltWith service statistics, as of October 5, 2022, about 6,500 sites around the world use IPFS. Of these, just under a third are located in the United States. This list includes decentralized exchange Uniswap, decentralized application data service Dapp Radar, and cryptocurrency startup platform DAO Maker.
The first web resource with IPFS support in 2015 was the Neocities hosting service. The largest network service provider Cloudflare started using IPFS in 2018 and launched own gateway in the system in 2022. In March 2020, the Opera browser provided access to the decentralized resources of the Unstoppable Domains provider by placing content on IPFS. In early 2021, the protocol integrated the Brave crypto browser.
IPFS technology began to be used as a response to censorship by regulators. First example loading has become in IPFS Turkish version of Wikipedia. In the spring of 2019, in response to Assange’s arrest, activists uploaded the WikiLeaks archive to IPFS.
IPFS is also used to store code. This is practiced, for example, by the Uniswap decentralized exchange team, which places in IPFS.
IPFS also acts as an important infrastructure layer of Web3, supporting the operation of NFT projects, decentralized applications and other resources. There are special companies that provide file management services in IPFS. For example, the Pinata platform allows you to monetize media files for NFTs issued on various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Algorand.
How to open an IPFS link
Many popular browsers such as Opera and Brave have already added native support for IPFS links. This means that you will be able to open sites in the specified browsers through an address with the ipfs:// prefix, for example:
ipfs://bafybeiaysi4s6lnjev27ln5icwm6tueaw2vdykrtjkwiphwekaywqhcjze/wiki/
However, this link will not open in Google Chrome. Instead, to access the resource, you will have to use the existing HTTPS protocol along with the address of the site where the file is stored, for example:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafybeiaysi4s6lnjev27ln5icwm6tueaw2vdykrtjkwiphwekaywqhcjze/wiki/
To directly open IPFS links in Google Chrome, you will need to install a special extension IPFS Companion. For the extension to work correctly, the developers recommend installing your own IPFS node on your computer. To do this, you need to go to the section IPFS Desktop on the IPFS official website and follow the simple instructions after selecting the appropriate platform: Windows, macOS or Ubuntu.
The Protocol Labs team also took care of the owners of domains and sites planning to transfer their web resources to IPFS. A special Fleek download servicewhich allows you to transfer and set up sites without having to install anything on your computer and deal with the command line or code.
Found a mistake in the text? Select it and press CTRL+ENTER
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