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The Inter Planetary File System - IPFS



The traditional web which was introduced as web 1.0 used centralized network approach. This involved a user requesting for data and receiving it back from a single main server. Later a distributed network was introduces as web 2.0 which can be thought of the current web protocol (working of chrome) where the requested data is fetched from a collection of servers working in

co-ordination. But both these approaches had flaws in it.


1. Failure of the main server or the master server would lead to data unavailability. When the server hosting all the data stops hosting for some reason, then the data won’t be available to the users. This could be problematic when users need data immediately and it is unavailable which may lead to huge loss for the user


2. Censorship – Any government, country or an organization may restrict access to websites for reasons like – threat to National security, inappropriate content, secure information etc. in these cases data is again not available to the public.


During the ongoing war between Russian and Ukraine, The Russian government banned access to Instagram as the public were agitated by political posts.


In order to address these issues, IPFS network was developed and it came into existence.

IPFS – A data storage and hosting network emerged to support the growth and development of web3 protocol, today it has various applications ranging from cryptocurrencies (Filecoin) to securely storing important data across the world.



The Architecture of the network is implemented using the peer to peer approach and the network is decentralized. Here, peer to peer means that every node in the network can participate in hosting, storing and accessing data. No node in the network is superior to other or it doesn’t have any special command over other nodes in the network.




Decentralization of network allows the protocol to become resistant to censorship and also the network is non-susceptible or immune to denial of service attacks which can lead to node crash and in turn lead to unavailability of data.


IPFS works on content based addressing (hash based addressing) rather than the traditional location based addressing (IP addressing). Data in the form of text, audio, video, image, can be broken down to small chunks of say 256 bytes, then they are stored in the database as an independent entity. Each entity is of fixed 256 bytes and has a content hash associated with it. The hash is generated using the IPFS hashing algorithms and are unique to each entity in the network.

The independent entities are merged together to form a file system and the root of the file system is given a root hash and this hash will be used to access the whole content in the IPFS network.

The users of IPFS protocol will be acting as nodes and whenever they access any data in the network, a copy of that data will be stored in their node so that it is available to other peers nearby.


The advantages of this protocol are:

1. If any node in the network goes down, then the requested data will be fetched from other nodes which has a copy of it. Hence data is available all the time unless no node in the network has a copy of data.


2. IPFS is faster than the traditional web as it is based on content addressing, any nearby peer node will have the requested data.


3. The load is equally distributed on all the nodes in the network, so it increases the efficiency of the network.


4. IPFS service can be used for developing decentralized web and applications.


IPFS is open source and built using Go language encouraging people to host their content on the network for free.


Brave and chrome supports IPFS protocol and it can even access data based on the given content Identifier.



For demo paste this link in the brave browser which will host the IPFS logo: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVp9pSKbXaxk7WWaVg4U8McLDZ1yQdKPznB8PcJfiiN8R?filename=demo.png


image source : flatcoin,google

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