Toward Decentralized Cloud Storage With IPFS: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Considerations
Trinh Viet Doan, Yiannis Psaras, Jörg Ott, Vaibhav Bajpai
Abstract
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a novel decentralized storage architecture, which provides decentralized cloud storage by building on founding principles of P2P networking and content addressing. IPFS is used by more than 230k peers per week and serves tens of millions of requests per day, which makes it an interesting large-scale operational network to study. While it is used as a building block in several projects and studies, its inner workings, properties, and implications have only been marginally explored in research. Thus, we provide an overview of the IPFS design and its core features, along with the opportunities that it opens, as well as the challenges that it faces because of its properties. Overall, IPFS presents an interesting set of characteristics and offers lessons that can help build decentralized systems of the future.