ETH.LIMO- Your privacy focused gateway.
Cruise the decentralized web in style.
What is ETH.LIMO (LIMO)?
A decentralized alternative to Cloudflare’s often unreliable eth.link service, LIMO is is a privacy-preserving ENS gateway, enabling users to access Ethereum-native dApps and content. LIMO functions as a drop-in replacement for eth.link; a Web 2.0 infrastructure stack for resolving Ethereum Name Service (ENS) records and associated IPFS content (Web 3.0). LIMO allows users and dApp developers to effortlessly access and host static sites built with a combination of IPFS and ENS. Key stakeholders* holders are able to participate in decisions related to all aspects of the LIMO project, making LIMO a truly decentralized and community accountable public good.
LIMO is intended to be operated as a reliable and secure public good for all users. Once the LIMO project has completed Alpha testing it will be released with an open source license and maintained by LIMO as a community project for the purposes of encouraging others to operate their own decentralized ENS/IPFS gateways.
Why do we need ETH.LIMO?
Core internet infrastructure is becoming increasingly centralized and as such, several existential threats have emerged that undermine the principles of an decentralized, open and free internet:
- Single points of failure (Cloudflare, CDNs, etc)
- Eth.link is unreliable
- All ENS gateway infrastructure is currently owned by a single entity (Cloudflare)
- Censorship
- Lack of non-commercial infrastructure
- Opacity of terms of service agreements and moderation policies
- Proliferation of proprietary browser extensions which require centralized services (Unstoppable domains, etc…)
- The erosion of the “commons” and “public space”
- Web 3.0 adoption is still nascent
- Most browsers cannot natively access ENS/IPFS
For end users, this means a limited selection of poor quality services that increasingly resemble a cable TV package. Accessing the dWeb can be a frustrating experience if eth.link is unavailable. For dApp developers, this leads to a limited selection of platforms and services in addition to lost revenue.
As an alternative to eth.link for users and dApp developers, any existing eth.link site can be accessed with eth.limo in the same manner. The LIMO project brings additional resiliency to dApps by providing an alternative means of access as a public good. Application owners can directly participate in the road map of LIMO, thus giving key stakeholders voting privileges for the services they depend upon. As the decentralized web continues to grow, it is imperative that community projects facilitate the transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0.
How does ETH.LIMO work?
LIMO operates as a reverse proxy for ENS names and IPFS content.
Much like eth.link, LIMO uses a wildcard DNS record *.eth.limo to dynamically capture requests for all ENS domains. The LIMO service automatically resolves the IPFS content hash of the requested ENS record and returns the corresponding static content over HTTPS. Since native IPFS resolution capabilities are missing from the majority of browsers, ETH.LIMO represents a bridge from the “normal” internet to the decentralized one.
Zero-configuration is required in order to access or host a site or dApp on ETH.LIMO, making ETH.LIMO an excellent no-cost solution for providing Web 2.0 access to your project.
Security and Privacy
The LIMO project enforces strong origin isolation policies for all resources by default. Projects accessed through ETH.LIMO automatically receive security hardened browser headers and all client data is encrypted with TLSv1.3 (default) or TLSv1.2 using the latest ciphersuites. All log data is fully anonymized, which prevents the ability to uniquely identify any single user.
Roadmap Features
Wildcard TLS certificates for subdomains*
ETH.LIMO allows developers to easily request certificates for nested subdomains such as *.mydapp.eth.limo and app.my.dapp.eth.limo, providing greater flexibility for application architecture.
Post Quantum Encryption*
The LIMO project has a vested interest in providing the best security, both in the present and future. In order to ensure that our users’ data remains secure forever, LIMO will be implementing post-quantum resistant encryption for all TLS client sessions. This guarantees that data captured today, cannot be decrypted in a quantum supremacy future.
More information regarding the threat posed by Quantum computers to modern encryption can be found here: https://www.csnp.org/post/the-current-state-of-post-quantum-cryptography.
Global ENS/IPFS CDN*
Geo and latency based routing support between global regions allows the LIMO project to effectively operate a global CDN for ENS and IPFS content retrieval, delivering a better end-user experience.
Open Source, turnkey ENS/IPFS gateway for anyone to use*
All codebases and configurations for the LIMO project will be released under an open source license, in addition to documentation and guides for running public facing, cloud native ENS/IPFS gateways. The LIMO project aims to provide a platform agnostic software stack for easily deploying your own ETH.LIMO service at home or in the cloud. Consideration is being given to the idea of allowing anyone to operate a node for the official ETH.LIMO network. More details on this feature will be released in the future.
Pin-caching*
Users of eth.link can attest to the periodic slow performance of content retrieval. Oftentimes requests must perform a full IPFS fetch, leading to long response times and frustration — “is my site working?”. ETH.LIMO will offer developers the ability to pin their content, allowing for faster retrieval and caching.
Analytics for developers*
LIMO provides out of the box analytics for your project. Ditch Google Analytics and use LIMO’s integrated, anonymized traffic report tool. Gain real-time insights into the geo-distribution of your users and easily track the most popular features and pages of your dApp or static site. LIMO also offers an easy to use reporting API for retrieving aggregated data. Additionally, LIMO can provide real-time feeds of the most popular dWeb content. Top sites, up and comers, trends, and more can easily be retrieved from our reporting API. Developers can also add custom metadata such as labels via tags and headers to enable bespoke reporting capabilities*.
ENS Resolution over DNS*
Easily resolve ENS records over LIMO’s RFC, and DNSLink compliant DNS service. Developers and system administrators can securely extend native ENS resolution capabilities to individual devices or even entire networks with DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) support.
