Towards Decentralised Cloud Storage with IPFS: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

TL;DR

This paper reviews IPFS, a decentralized storage system, discussing its design, opportunities, challenges, and implications for future decentralized systems, based on its large-scale deployment and core features.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of IPFS's architecture, properties, and potential, highlighting research gaps and future directions for decentralized cloud storage.

Findings

IPFS is used by over 230,000 peers weekly.

It handles tens of millions of requests daily.

IPFS's properties pose unique opportunities and challenges.

Abstract

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a novel decentralised storage architecture, which attempts to provide decentralised 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 which can help building decentralised systems of the future.