InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)

return to the de facto Standards area

Source: The following is from the white paper IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System

Data Sheet for InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).

Characteristic	Value
Original author(s)	Juan Benet and Protocol Labs
Developer(s)	Protocol Labs
Initial release	24 July 2014
Stable release	0.4.19 / 1 March 2019
Repository	https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
Written in	Protocol implementations: Go (reference implementation), JavaScript, C,[1] Python Client libraries: Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Scala, Haskell, Swift, Common Lisp, Rust, Ruby, PHP, C#, Erlang
Operating system	FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows
Available in	English
Type	Protocol, distributed file system, content delivery network
License	MIT license
Website	https://ipfs.io/

Abstract

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high throughput content-addressed block storage model, with content addressed hyper links. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.1) “IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System (DRAFT 3)”, Juan Denet, 24 July 2014, https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/blob/master/papers/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-p2p-file-system.pdf