After communicating with many NFT Artists, or some people in the Web2 field.I came to the conclusion that many people don't understand IPFS very well, and some even feel that IPFS is a technology created for NFT development…

The rise of NFT has really brought more attention to IPFS. In fact IPFS was launched in an alpha version in February 2015, much earlier than the NFT explosion today.

What's IPFS?

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a distributed, peer-to-peer file-sharing network that is well-positioned to become the underpinning of a new, decentralized web.

People usually call a NFT immutable, because it is on IPFS. That means the NFT artwork is hosted on IPFS network and nobody can change it. This avoids a lot of NFT scams. Here is an article written by my colleague Val, you can have a look if you don’t know why NFT need IPFS tech. IPFS now features a perfect increase in trust for NFT.

But in fact IPFS is designed to build a decentralized network of the future. In this article, I will give you some “Keywords” to help you better understand IPFS.

Decentralized

Everyone can create one or more IPFS nodes to become part of the IPFS network. Once you own an IPFS node, you will find that you have thousands of ally nodes!

When you store a file on your own IPFS node. When someone accesses it, It will be synced and cached to the nearest IPFS node of the person being accessed. We all know that physical distance increases access speed. With IPFS, access around the world can be made faster and If the files you store on IPFS are really active, the file will not only be in your IPFS nodes, but also thousands of ally nodes until their cache is cleared. That’s Decentralized.

Resist censorship

Every file on IPFS own a unique CID, it is generated by cryptographic hashing. Any change will make the CID of the file different and any changes to a file don't overwrite the original. You can also consider CID as the file identity on IPFS network. If you need to search a file on IPFS, just search its CID. Data retrieved by CID is credible.

Because CID is immutable and credible. NFT is precisely the use of CID to associate metadata to ensure that NFT artwork you bought is not tampered with.

Pin

Synchronization of data between IPFS nodes is possible, but the node capacity is limited, so the new cached content has to replace the old non-accessed content.

But if you choose to pin contents on one or more IPFS nodes, these contents will not be removed to ensure that data persists on IPFS. NFT metadata is usually pinned on IPFS nodes to avoid it to disappear. But no worries, even if the metadata disappears from the IPFS network, you can re-upload it to the IPFS network. Because the file itself has not changed, so the generated CID is consistent, so your NFT still has accessibility!

What can IPFS achieve?

Just like this article’s title. IPFS can do more than just empower NFT.

Censorship-resistant and verifiable mechanism makes IPFS suitable for hosting more databases that do not require third-party auditing.

Distributed Wikipedia Mirror is a project maintained by the IPFS official team. The project aims to bring Wikipedia to the IPFS network and eventually build a purely distributed Wikipedia.

Some outstanding projects just like Uniswap choose to host their front end on IPFS to resist censorship and accessibility. Users can access it directly through Uniswap's CID via browsers that support the IPFS protocol (Brave, Opera, etc.), or through dozens of IPFS Http public gateways or other gateway providers on browsers such as Google.

If you are a project owner. Choose IPFS as your storage layer can let you avoid downtime, censorship, intervention, etc. these kinds of centralized server problems. Especially in blockchain, we believe that the power of decentralization is far greater than that of centralization. So, if you need, why not IPFS.

4EVERLAND

4EVERLAND has been committed to providing users and developers with better IPFS-based services. We set up a Swarm node for IPFS and built a global acceleration gateway to ensure the availability of the IPFS network in the Web2 environment.

Hosting let you can rapidly deploy your website on IPFS with global acceleration access. We also integrate ENS, SNS to make your website completely decentralized.

Bucket is a S3-compatible storage aggregator based on IPFS and Arweave, popular with a wide range of developers as well as NFT users.

For individual users with no technical background, 4EVERLAND makes using IPFS as easy as using Google Drive. For devs and projects, 4EVERLAND provides a Web2 compatible development environment and powerful interface, APIs.

Welcome to do something on IPFS via us. And welcome contact with me.

Max, BD&Partnership of 4EVERLAND