IPFS: Brave Integrates IPFS, js-IPFS 0.54.0 release, January meetup, ETHDenver is here, The Clay testnet is live, Welcome Venus to the Filecoin mainnet, The Graph evaluates integrating additional L1 blockchains, The Space SDK library is out, 2 wave of Humanode Alpha tests, Unstoppable Domains’ IPFS Innovation Grant program, and more!

Paradigm

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Paradigm

15 min readFeb 4, 2021

Biweekly report on the IPFS ecosystem vol.1, 21st January — 4th February

Why IPFS?

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open. It utilizes DHT (distributed hash table) and Merkle DAG (directed acyclic graph) data structures. IPFS uses a protocol similar to BitTorrent to decide how to move data around the network. One of the advanced features of IPFS is that it supports file versioning. To achieve file versioning, it uses data structures similar to Git.

IPFS forms the Content Centric Internet where you access data directly from any server in the world, and works in the closed environments disconnected from the Internet. Interplanetary Linked Data makes it possible from to access data from any public Merkle-tree like Ethereum.

Here’s how IPFS works:

Check out the top IPFS open source projects here

The Top 117 Ipfs Open Source Projects

Browse The Most Popular 117 Ipfs Open Source Projects

awesomeopensource.com

Latest IPFS News

IPFS in Brave — Native Access to the Distributed Web

This is the first time a major browser has implemented native support for IPFS, and is a major step towards a more resilient, user-first internet.

While the IPFS protocol is still in development, making it more easily available is important for users who have real problems in their daily online lives — internet outages and shutdowns, censorship of critical information such as COVID-19 news, high cost of internet access, and the ability to share and collaborate in offline or disconnected environments. These aren’t problems everyone has, and people who don’t have these problems at all may not understand why IPFS is so important. But for those who desperately need a resilient internet that puts them in control of their online experiences, IPFS is now just one-click to install in the Brave browser.

IPFS Features in Brave:

Brave has integrated IPFS into its desktop web browser for Windows, macOS, and Linux. When Brave detects an address which is an HTTP gateway URL to IPFS content, or a native IPFS address such as ipfs:// or ipns:// it will prompt the user to install and enable the native IPFS node, or to use an HTTP gateway. The default gateway used is dweb.link, which is run by Protocol Labs. Users can also specify a gateway of their choice in the browser settings. You can access the IPFS administrative UI at brave://ipfs,, or enable IPFS Companion and select “My Node” button in the main menu.

What’s Next?

This initial release of native support for IPFS in Brave provides basic node functionality. There’s still a lot to do — here’s a list of some planned work for this year, and areas we’d like to experiment in, as well:

Improve performance and stability — reduce memory, CPU, and bandwidth use
Ease both publishing and sharing of IPFS content in browser UI
Add features for revisitation, co-hosting, and offline/local collaboration
Define the application model for IPFS web apps
Experiment with integrating the features and economic models of Basic Attention Token and Filecoin
Develop the security and privacy user interface and visual language for IPFS in the browser address bar
Add IPFS support to Brave’s Android browser

Brave x IPFS AMA on Reddit: Brave CTO and co-founder Brian Bondy, and IPFS Ecosystem Lead Dietrich Ayala took the time out to answer any and all of the community’s questions. Read their responses on Reddit now!

How we put IPFS in Brave: In this post, the team discuss the process in bringing this collaboration to fruition, and take a look under the hood to see how they accomplished this integration!

Download Brave browser now

js-IPFS 0.54.0 brings UPnP NAT Hole Punching to your js-IPFS node

js-IPFS@0.54.0 enables NAT traversal with UPnP enabled routers for improved connectivity, but also requires a repo upgrade in the browser

New features

enable upnp nat hole punching (#3426)
support remote pinning services in ipfs-http-client (#3293) (ba240fd)

Breaking changes

ipfs-repo upgrade requires repo migration to v10 in the browser

Bug fixes

updates webpack example to use v5 (#3512) (c7110db), closes #3511
issue with isolateModules flag (#3495)
use https agent for https requests (#3490)
update deps (#3514) (061d77c)
document the ipfs http client constructor arguments (#3478)

What’s next?

Check out the js-IPFS Project Roadmap which contains headline features organised in the order we hope them to land.

Only large features are called out in the roadmap, expect lots of small bugfix releases between the roadmapped items!

Read more >>>

🖧 IPLD weekly Sync 2021–02–01

Learn how to import JSON files into IPSQL
The Beyond Bitswap project review has launched and released a new Bitswap paper
Check out also: IPFS Weekly 119 & IPFS Weekly 120

Awareness and Events

January 22nd: IPFS January meetup

If you missed IPFS January virtual meetup, or want to revisit something you heard there, now all of the presentations are available for your viewing! There are talks from the IPFS planning team, Peergos, Humanode, and Vault74, so be sure to check them all out.

February 5th — 12th: Join the IPFS team at ETHDenver 2021, year of the Spork Marmot

In years past, the IPFS community has had a large presence at ETHDenver, partially due to the incredibly welcoming and encouraging decentralization community built locally in Denver. Last year, the team was truly blown away by how much they saw the ETHDenver community embrace IPFS. After all was said and done:

24 out of 52 submissions utilized IPFS in their project, with
8 of the 16 finalist projects, and
3 out of the 5 winners triumphing, having used IPFS.
And 80+ bounties were awarded for using IPFS!

Not only that, last year Cryptorado organized the Decentralized Network Summit, inviting the IPFS community to a day full of speakers and workshops from the folks at 3Box, NEAR, Unstoppable Domains, Pinata, Tupelo, Textile, Kauri, The Graph and more, drawing 100+ attendees.

So in that spirit of ETHDenvers past, the IPFS Help Desk, spearheaded by Pinata back in 2019, will be back this year, helmed by your favorite IPFS community folks, so be sure to come visit them in the Spork Shill Zone, right next to the Textile booth, every day that the Virtual Castle is open and ask all of your questions, from hacking to hoping, and everything in between.

Moreover, the team decided to hack together virtually on Tuesday, February 9, starting at the IPFS Help Desk, and moving to Zoom for 2 sessions after the Virtual Castle closes for the day.

Hack the Help Desk! Tuesday, February 9 (all times local to Denver, Mountain Time)

Session 1: Virtual Castle at Help Desk — 9am to 11am
Session 2: TBD Zoom — 11am to 1pm
Session 3: TBD Zoom — 1pm to 3pm

Stay tuned for more information on the bounties and IPFS community presentations! Register to attend ETHDenver 2021 here.

February 23rd, 2021 Join IPFS Community Meetup

The next IPFS meetup will be here before you know it, so register now.

Projects’ Updates

Data Storage and Management

Filecoin

Welcome Venus to the Filecoin mainnet: On February 2nd, the team announced that at epoch 455673 (Jan 30th, 2021, 03:16 UTC), miner f0128788 running Venus v0.9.0, mined its very first block on mainnet.
Filecoin Plus: Aligning Participants with Useful Storage: Filecoin is a global marketplace of storage and its related services, matching a diverse set of storage providers with demand for secure distributed cloud storage services. As a blockchain network, Filecoin provides a robust, decentralized, verifiable platform for anyone to store and interact with data.
Filecoin MinerX Fellowship Program: The MinerX Fellowship engages small and medium-sized miners distributed across the world to help improve Filecoin’s experience and productivity in the early stages of the network. MinerX is designed to build a solid foundation of geographically-diverse, reliable, long-term storage options to accelerate the development of tools and services in the Filecoin ecosystem.

The Graph

After a Successful Mainnet Launch on Ethereum, The Graph Evaluates Integrating Additional L1 blockchains: The Graph Foundation is exploring providing support for additional Layer 1 blockchains, Bitcoin, Polkadot, NEAR, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and Celo to support Web3 development
The Graph explains why GRT cannot be ignored.
AMA with Yaniv Tal, Project Lead at Graph Protocol:

3Box Labs & Ceramic Network

Launching the Clay Testnet: You can now build with Clay, the official testnet for the Ceramic Network.
3Box is now 3Box Labs — A future on Ceramic Network: In this big announcement, the team shares that 3Box is becoming 3Box Labs to reflect a new focus on the development of the Ceramic Network ecosystem.
Upgrading from 3Box to Ceramic and IDX: 3Box Labs is sunsetting its current line of 3Box products. Learn how to migrate your integration to Ceramic and IDX.
Ceramic testnet and IDX to debut at EthDenver: Decentralized identity and data protocols from 3Box Labs await hackers at EthDenver, along with $10,000 in prizes.

Fleek

Introducing the Space SDK: Build Your Web & Mobile App on the Open Web. The Space SDK is a complimentary framework that enables the use of features enabled by IPFS, Textile, Ethereum, GunDB, and other Open Web protocols via the Space API.
Welcome GunDB to the Open Web Protocol Stack. The Open Web stack grows with GunDB, a distributed graph database that works in a decentralized network in a peer-to-peer way.
Fleek reminds us why it is important to rebuild the web, in this recent thread.

Computation & Trust Layers

Humanode

Humanode opens the second wave of Humanode Alpha tests. The 0.0.2 version combines low-level optimized components (Dlib with face recognition and embedding models), as well as high-level engines such as QtQuick (Qt-framework) and built-in Chromium browser. Now testers can send proper Merkle-CRDT-based transactions. You can find the participation form in the official Humanode telegram chat.
The Humanode team published a detailed overview of the novel public DLT — Epoch-CRDT that describes the protocol and logical levels of transactions validated by biometrically encrypted human nodes. Feel free to check it out!

Epoch-CRDT mechanism between equal human nodes

By Victor Smirnov and Dato Kavazi As the Humanode network consists of equal human beings who become equal network…

blog.humanode.io

Humanode co-founder Victor Smirnov was presenting Humanode and how it utilizes IPFS to create a new permissionless protocol safeguarded by human existence on IPFS January meetup.

Integrations/ Collaborations

Brave

Brave Integrates IPFS: IPFS, the peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the Web faster, safer, and more open, has been integrated into Brave, the fast, privacy-oriented browser, reinventing the Web for users, publishers and advertisers.
Brave Passes 25 Million Monthly Active Users: Over the past year, Brave has more than doubled the number of the users, going from 11.6 to 25.4 million monthly active users, and from 3.8 to 8.6 million daily active users.
Ecosia is now an Official Search Engine Option on Brave: Ecosia, the green search engine that uses its advertising revenues to plant trees in areas affected by deforestation, is now integrated as a search engine option in Brave.
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately? Episode #7: Ephemeral Site Storage: This post presents “ephemeral site storage”, a new strategy for managing third-party storage in Brave, designed to improve Web compatibility, while maintaining the same level of privacy protection.

Cloudflare

Netflix

Open Sourcing the Netflix Domain Graph Service Framework: GraphQL for Spring Boot: Netflix has developed a Domain Graph Service (DGS) framework and it is now open source. The DGS framework simplifies the implementation of GraphQL, both for standalone and federated GraphQL services.
Optimizing the Aural Experience on Android Devices with xHE-AAC

Persistence

Infura

Infura’s Eth2 API is Live! How to Access the Public Beta: Start accessing the Eth2 Beacon Chain through the Infura Eth2 API. Here’s how to access the Beta
Build a Flash Loan Arbitrage Bot on Infura, Part II: In the previous last post, the team went over the three main concepts behind their bot: arbitrage, contract-based transactions and optimistic transfer. In this post, they’ll walk through how to structure a program that can watch for and execute on profitable arbitrage trades.

Textile

IPLD + Web Standards = Good: Recently, Textile and 3Box got together with the Ethereum Foundation and Protocol Labs to design and implement some of the JOSE web standards using InterPlanetary Linked Data (IPLD).
Powergate v2.0.0 is here: This release comes with many new features and tools. Since the breadth of changes is quite broad, the team will focus on particular points in the release notes .
Check out this WordPress plugin that uses Textile Tools to backup the posts of any WordPress site to IPFS and Filecoin.

Pinata

Getting started with Pinata: How to use IPFS with Brave utilizing a pinning service.
Discover how to build a Substack on IPFS using Pinata

Identity

Handshake

The Shake: Jan. 31, 2021 — the latest weekly recap of the Handshake ecosystem and protocol:

Community / Tech / Stats:

DeFi Frontends: Sushi.swap now redirects to the SushiSwap protocol frontend. Bancor.rewards redirects to the Bancor staking rewards frontend. Custom URL shorteners are how Handshake names start as toys. Though it’s a short leap from redundant redirects to default domains as the threat of censorship looms larger.
Interchain FM: Riad Wahby, who worked on the initial HNS airdrop, discusses how to implement private airdrops on Interchain. Monday’s conversation features the co-founders of Kyokan who developed Footnote, a layer two social protocol for Handshake.
dLinks: Decentralized link trees are a real and growing use case for Handshake. Maren Altman, viral astrologer, joined in with a dLink of her own and a HNS shoutout.
Ratings: Have a Handshake name? Calculate its rarity on Niami.
Namebase: Tieshun of Namebase was on the Crypto Current podcast to discuss Handshake and the decentralized web.
Resales: Amidst the current NFT Cambrian explosion, the top-level domain NFT/ resold privately for $84,000.
Giveaway: The Shake is giving away 2000 HNS in next week’s Feb. 7 newsletter. Follow us on twitter and RT this tweet to be eligible to win.

Community / Tech / Stats

Goldshell Miner: Goldshell is expanding to support both Handshake and SiaCoin, securing two assets fundamental to the decentralized web.
Urkel Mining Pool: Urkel mining pool website got a refresh. Urkel, the first Handshake mining pool, is evolving to support multiple assets to grow the US mining sector.
Mining Scam: Handshake ASIC mining scam thwarted — watch out for opportunistic cons as Handshake grows and read Goldshell’s official statement.

Name Stats

Total Names Registered: 524k TLDs, 1 week change: +7.8%
Top Name Auction This Week: http://k/ for 55,000 HNS ($6,979)
Top Name Resale This Week: http://nft/ for 700,000 HNS ($84,000)

Unstoppable Domains

The IPFS Innovation Grant Program: Last week, Unstoppable Domains introduced the IPFS Innovation Grant program to support groundbreaking projects utilizing IPFS with $2500 of funding and support, in order to advance the decentralized web. Applications are due February 28th, 2021 and you can also apply if your product is already live.
Welcome to the Unstoppable Podcast: Decentralized technology has the power to change the world and shape the future. Learn more in our new podcast, The Unstoppable Podcast.

Blockchain Domains arrive to crypto exchanges with OKCoin.
Verifying Identity in Decentralized Ecosystems: The ability to verify identities in a decentralized ecosystem could drive a shift toward a more decentralized web. Learn from the discussion with Sergey Nazarov on why they’ve teamed up with Chainlink to increase the security of blockchain interactions.
What is the Decentralized Web, and Why Should I Care?

Marketplace

Origin

January 2021 Origin Token (OGN) Holder Update: Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the January 2021 edition.
Origin Dollar (OUSD) Coverage Now Available From Cover Protocol: One of the leading providers of DeFi coverage, Cover Protocol, has added coverage support for OUSD.

Content

Audius

What’s Next for $AUDIO: Learn what it means to own the platform you love as we explore the potential for new $AUDIO features and rewards together.
Why Governance Matters: As an artist-owned platform, Audius was designed to be owned, operated and managed by its very users. This is why $AUDIO — the native platform token — plays such an important role in the wider Audius ecosystem. Using $AUDIO, tokenholders can vote to make changes to the network.

Peergos

In case you missed our talk on the Peergos architecture and latest developments at the IPFS January meetup, here’s the recording:

Social Media

Berty

News #53: The team has gotten a lot of new subscribers since a Hacker News post last Wednesday and in Reddit/Open.

Open Source. Highlights from the last 2 weeks:

Made headway on some app extensions to test the push notifications
Used our new debugging tools to dig into stability issues
Finished gomobile-ipfs integration (berty/berty#3024 + ipfs-shipyard/gomobile-ipfs#61)
Implement partial backup features on go-orbit-db
Adapted internal/tinder for p2p-circuit usage
Fixed recently broken attachments in conversations
Added a Member.IsCreator field to the messenger API to make life easier for non-Berty apps using our library (berty/berty#3000)
Continue working on multi-account UX and flows (berty/berty#3013)
Improved debugging by adding log management on Flipper
Merged Berty+gomobile-ipfs integration (berty/berty#3024)
Continued working on custom BLE driver & stabilizing connections
Refactored the Tor init/uninit code to improve support account switching
Continued progress on the DNS over TLS over Tor (berty/berty#2910)
Various UI small improvements
Various fixes from testers’ feedback

Vault74

Vault74’s entire WebRTC layer was rewritten as well as the encryption side.
The team is starting work on mobile this week as well as speeding up setting up dev environments for contributors.
Matt Wisniewski introduces the community to Vault74, a decentralized chat and collaboration platform built on top of IPFS. The project has built a great community already and aims to provide a place to chat with crystal clear voice and video, and large file sharing while abstracting blockchain to the backend to make using it straight-forward.

Other

Cyber

Fission

Fission Demo Day January 2021: The Fission team takes this time to talk about new releases & product updates, early demos of in-progress work, planned roadmap items and open Q&A.
Brooklyn Zelenka at Speakeasy JS, Jan 22nd, 2021: Brooklyn Zelenka presented the work the team is doing at Fission at Speakeasy JS which is “the meetup for mad science, hacking, and experiments”.

Robonomics

Robonomics Rococo V1.1 release published on GitHub

Robonomics Winter School notes:

MISC

Does IPFS have a blockchain? One topic of discussion we see from time to time, that seems to be gaining popularity is the question of whether IPFS has a blockchain. It’s been integrated with blockchains, and it deals with the complexities of storage. Luckily, this recent post highlights the various answers you can feel empowered to use when someone asks you this important question.
A letter to my high school self about IPFS: Recently, to the benefit of the community, Henry Quinn discovered IPFS. But unlike some pieces of code one finds perusing the web, this experience reawakened a curiosity he remembered from a very specific time period. Recommended reading for all of the curious tinkerers.
ResNetLab reviews 2020; Hydra Booster, Gossipsub, Drand, and Filecoin all shipped this year.
This design combines RSS and IPFS, titled IPIS, the InterPlanetary Information Syndication.
PAPER: IPFS and Medwish, a decentralised and secure health data management solution.
Lifehacker asks, “What is IPFS and why does it matter in Brave’s web browser?”
Help localize the IPFS project by translating it into your native language.
ProtoSchool introduces learners to Merkle DAGs: What was once a single lesson on data structures is now a meaty multiple-choice tutorial (read: no coding skills required) that digs deep into the unique superpowers of Merkle DAGs as a content-addressed data structure that’s perfectly suited to form the backbone of the decentralized web.

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