Cloudflare Introduces Blockchain Like IPFS Gateway

Cloudflare, a company which excels in web performance and security introduced a new and easy way to access content online in form of InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The IPFS Gateway is the first product to be released as part of their Distributed Web Gateway project.

 

The gateway doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer. Cloudflare explained the two key differences between IPFS and Traditional Web; first being that with IPFS anyone can cache and serve any content—for free. Traditional web relies on data hosts or servers to store contents and serve it to the rest of the web, while IPFS uses a P2P network to provide data to the users.

 

This means that every user on the network act as a productive node and can serve data to other users.

“We’ve wanted to store CryptoKitty art on IPFS since we launched, but the tech just wasn’t ready yet. Cloudflare’s announcement turns IPFS from a promising experiment into a robust tool for commercial deployment. Great stuff!”, said Dieter Shirley, CTO of Dapper Labs and Co-founder of CryptoKitties.

 

The second key difference is that the data is content-addressed, rather than location-addressed. In simple terms, it means that when you’re looking for something on the internet, you tell the network where to look and the network sends back what it found. But with IPFS, you tell the network what to look for, and the network figures out where to look. The difference occurs by making use of cryptographic hash which is a long string of letters and numbers that is unique to a data block, unlike the use of IP addresses in the traditional web. The process is similar to that of a blockchain mechanism where each block has a unique identifier and any change can be detected by a change in the hash number.

“Cloudflare is excited about the possibilities introduced by these new technologies and we see our gateway as a tool to help bridge the gap between the traditional web and the new generation of distributed web technologies headlined by IPFS. By enabling everyday people to explore IPFS content in their browser, we make the ecosystem stronger and support its growth.”, read the official Cloudflare blog post.

 

The official blog post outlines the possibilities of this technology in simple terms and how it works. You can check it out here.