Our digital life is data-driven. The bedrock of our digital future is trustworthy, resilient data storage. Today, that market is dominated by centralized cloud services - Dropbox, AWS, Google, and iCloud know more about me than I do. But this model comes with inherent risks and downsides: censorship, data loss, and exploitation by profit-seeking platforms. Ultimately, you don’t own your data and someone else is holding the keys.
Wait a minute… this sounds like a case for…. DECENTRALIZATION!
Enter decentralized storage (DStorage)—a web3 concept aiming to shift data custody away from big tech and back to you. Today, let’s take a peek at the first and most foundational name in the game: IPFS.
IPFS: The Backbone of a Distributed Web
Origin Story:
Once upon a time—on the messy, breakable, and sometimes bossy internet—a young computer scientist named Juan Benet looked around and said, “There has to be a better way.” It was 2014, and the web as we knew it was full of links that broke, files that vanished, and centralized servers that could silence anyone with a power switch. Juan, curious and idealistic, had grown up in both the physical and digital world, and he imagined a different kind of internet: one that acted more like a resilient library than a fragile phone line. Something like… an InterPlanetary File System.
Why “InterPlanetary?”
Because this dreamer thought that if humans ever made it to Mars, the way we shared files had better not depend on Earth’s spotty servers. We’d need something distributed and censorship-resistant—a system where every file, image, or snippet of data could be fetched from anyone, anywhere who happened to have it, as long as you knew its cryptographic fingerprint.
So what is it?
IPFS is a protocol that doesn’t care where a file is, but what it is. Instead of retrieving catphoto.jpg from somewebsite.com, you’d ask the network: “Does anyone have the file that matches this unique hash?” If the answer was yes—even from a stranger across the globe—IPFS would fetch it. In 2015 IPFS was launched by Protocol Labs, and it quickly became the darling of the decentralized web. Developers used it to store NFTs, host uncensorable blogs, and even back up academic papers. When you upload a file, IPFS breaks it into smaller chunks, hashes each chunk, and distributes them across participating nodes. This system ensures content is verifiable and tamper-proof.
Who are these “Participating nodes”??
In the IPFS network, anyone can be a node. That includes: Individuals running IPFS on personal computers Developers using IPFS to support decentralized apps. Infrastructure providers like Pinata or web3.storage offering guaranteed uptime and paid pinning services. Institutions using IPFS to archive scientific, cultural, or historic content.
WHY are they doing it?
IPFS doesn’t have built-in incentives (like rewards for minting a block). If they are not getting paid, why do nodes participate? Reasons vary… it could be personal utility, for someone who wants to host their own content in a cheap, durable way. Participation could be driven by someone’s philosophical alignment with decentralization and open knowledge (hats off to you, punks, nerds, and rebels). As always, some will find a business opportunity and participate for that reason (see “pinning services” below). Running a node gives you more control over access to your content and lets you contribute to the health of the decentralized web. This diversity of participants makes IPFS resilient and community-powered.
How does my data stay permanently in IPFS?
In truth, it might not. Data that is NEVER called for or accessed will eventually cease to exist in the network. It’s like the premise of the movie Coco, where the spirits in the underworld die a second death the last time someone on earth utters their name. So how do users guarantee their data is safe? First of all, anything that is accessed regularly is safe because it will have lots of fresh copies all over the distributed system. Second, where there’s a market there’s a service: Companies have emerged offering “Pinning services.” For a low fee, they take responsibility for pinging your files on a regular basis, keeping them in the fresh circulation layer of decentralized data. Others tell their local IPFS server never to delete your files… so there’s always at least 1 copy of it on the network..
In Summary
Here’s the quick takeaways on the Pros & Cons of IPFS:
Pros
- Efficient for distributing and sharing content
- Decentralized and censorship-resistant
- Free and open source
Cons
- No built-in economic incentive
- No guarantees of long-term file availability unless pinned
- Your files are not private (unless you take the extra step of encrypting them first)
Best Use Cases
- Hosting decentralized websites
- Temporary or user-managed file sharing where privacy is not a concern.
- Backend for decentralized apps (DApps)
IPFS in the Cardano Ecosystem: Real-World Use
So how is IPFS being used in the Cardano universe?
NFTs That Don’t Vanish
Cardano NFTs are often stored off-chain, with file links embedded in their token records. Why? Because on-chain storage is expensive, and files like images or music don’t fit neatly into blockchain transactions. So what are those links? Technically, an NFT could be sitting linked on an AWS server …. But that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? So, MANY NFTs are stored instead on IPFS! IPFS offers a decentralized, cost-effective solution to ensure that your collectible art, music, or ticket stub doesn’t disappear.. BUT… there’s a catch: if the IPFS-hosted file isn’t pinned, it could vanish. That’s why responsible NFT projects either use pinning services or combine IPFS with other distributed file storage systems like Arweave or Filecoin for durability.
Blockfrost + IPFS
Blockfrost, a popular API platform in the Cardano ecosystem, uses IPFS under the hood. When developers upload metadata through Blockfrost, it gets published to IPFS automatically. And it doesn’t stop there—Blockfrost has partnered with the Filecoin Foundation to archive this IPFS data long-term. This hybrid ensures the data you write today won’t disappear tomorrow.
Catalyst Experiments
In Project Catalyst, decentralized storage has come up in multiple project proposals. A quick search on CatalystExplorer.com turns up 287 proposals that mention IPFS, and 81 of them were funded! Any of these would be a great place to poke around and learn more about how Cardano blockchain projects are leveraging decentralized storage.
Education, Research, and Archives
Several Cardano educational and research initiatives (yes, including some by Lido Nation 😉) use IPFS to host documents and ensure persistent access across languages, borders, and time zones. It’s not flashy, but it’s crucial: if the point of decentralization is access and resilience, decentralized storage is non-negotiable.
The insight?
The internet doesn’t have to be owned to be useful. IPFS showed that a network of volunteers, rebels, archivists, and dreamers could knit together a new kind of web—one that forgets less, breaks less, and listens more. And that’s how a sci-fi-sounding file system became one of the quiet architects of the decentralized future.
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