The Cloud Strikes Back: Investigating the Decentralization of IPFS

TL;DR

This study provides a large-scale analysis of IPFS, revealing significant centralization tendencies driven by cloud hosting and key stakeholders, which pose challenges to its goal of decentralizing the web.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive multi-modal measurement of IPFS, highlighting centralization issues and stakeholder influence in the network.

Findings

High degree of centralization in IPFS nodes

Majority of nodes hosted in cloud environments

Identification of key stakeholders influencing the ecosystem

Abstract

Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS) is one of the largest peer-to-peer filesystems in operation. The network is the default storage layer for Web3 and is being presented as a solution to the centralization of the web. In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-modal measurement study of the IPFS network. We analyze the topology, the traffic, the content providers and the entry points from the classical Internet. Our measurements show significant centralization in the IPFS network and a high share of nodes hosted in the cloud. We also shed light on the main stakeholders in the ecosystem. We discuss key challenges that might disrupt continuing efforts to decentralize the Web and highlight multiple properties that are creating pressures toward centralization.