The Best of Both Worlds: Exploring the Role of Centralization in IPFS

Fri, Sep 15, 2023, 02:30 PM · 24:27

Web centralization and consolidation have created potential single points of failure, e.g., in areas such as content hosting, name resolution, and certification. The "Decentralized Web," led by open-source software implementations, attempts to build decentralized alternatives. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is part of this effort and provides a fully decentralized object storage and retrieval layer. This comes with challenges, though: Decentralization can increase complexity and overhead, as well as compromise performance, scalability, and system stability. As the lead developers of IPFS, we have therefore begun to explore more hybrid approaches. In this talk, we will discuss the trade-offs, and our implemented and proposed solutions, as well as give an outlook.