What is IPFS?

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is an open-source hypermedia communication protocol through which peer-to-peer nodes store and distribute data in a single distributed file system. How does it work? Let’s see!

Juan Benet, the founder and CEO of the American startup Protocol Labs, created the solution. He referred to it as a “distributed, permanent web,” implying that the IPFS-created site can never be closed by anyone.

‘In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high throughput content-addressed block storage model, with content- addressed hyperlinks,” — he said in the project whitepaper.

How does IPFS work?

When information is uploaded to an IP address for access to an object, file, or user data, the system is formed with reference to its unique cryptographic hash identifier rather than the server (Content Identifier, CID).

When the file is downloaded again, the CID remains unchanged, and the updated versions are given new hash identifiers. The InterPlanetary Naming System (IPNS) name service — an analogue of DNS on the traditional Internet — is used to allow users who have access to an earlier version of the file to have it as well as later versions.

In the system, files larger than 256 KB in size are divided into parts, hashed, and organized into IPLD objects (InterPlanetary Linked Data), which consist of two components: the data itself and links to parts of the file connected to each other via a directed acyclic graph of the Merkle tree (Merkle DAG).

The IPFS daemon, the software responsible for system communications, then temporarily caches the data or, at the user’s discretion, permanently “attaches” (pins) them to itself and distributes them to other nodes upon request. In the future, such nodes may serve as content providers or as recipients of content.

After requesting the content in the system’s Distributed Hash Table (DHT), the nodes closest to the user with a copy of the required data are sought, and they are the ones who provide portions of the file.

The IPFS hyperlink example: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRTSA1UFHSx3z7taNRwUVM8AjB2EQwKvyZu3BfJg9QRtZ/home.html

How is IPFS used?

The IPFS protocol and implementations are still in the early stages of development and may contain bugs or hidden vulnerabilities. However, it is assumed that IPFS will be useful for storing important data and creating static websites. In practice, its use increases data transfer rate and network bandwidth, decreases node load due to distribution, allows you to bypass censorship, avoid DDoS attacks, and the appearance of “dead” links. The system has no single point of failure, and the nodes do not need to trust one another. Furthermore, IPFS content can theoretically be stored indefinitely.

The Geocities hosting service was the first IPFW-enabled web resource in 2015. On the basis of IPS, a decentralized video platform DTube, an online trading platform OpenBazaar, and other solutions have been developed.

The IPFS link added to the cryptocurrency transaction enables you to save large amounts of data that are protected from changes in the blockchain without slowing it down. For example, following the arrest of Julian Assange in the spring of this year, one of the Bitcoin Cash developers, as a show of support, posted a complete archive of Wikileaks documents — approximately 30 GB — on the Wikileaks.cash website in IPFS and as a link in the BCH blockchain.

Since 2014, the Protocol Labs development team has been working on developing an IPFS-based decentralized hosting system for Filecoin files. The project is preparing to launch the test and main networks, but Juan Benet discovered in 2018 that his company’s accomplishments had inspired the creators of TRON: several sheets from the Filecoin and IPFS documentation were included in the whitepaper of this Chinese project, albeit in a slightly modified form. TRON also announced its intention to launch its own version of IPFS based on BitTorrent — BTFS — in the spring of 2019.

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