IPFS Distributed File System

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open by replacing location-based HTTP addressing with content-based addressing. Created by Juan Benet and developed by Protocol Labs since 2014, with over 15 billion files stored on the network as of 2026. Key features include: content addressing (files and data are identified by cryptographic hashes of their content (CIDs), enabling deduplication, integrity verification, and content-based routing instead of location-based URLs), libp2p networking (modular peer-to-peer networking stack with pluggable transports, peer routing via Kademlia DHT, pubsub messaging, and NAT traversal), Bitswap (block exchange protocol for requesting and serving data blocks from peers with wantlists and ledger-based accounting), UnixFS (file system abstraction layer supporting files, directories, symlinks, and large file chunking), IPLD (InterPlanetary Linked Data for linking content-addressed data across different blockchain and data structures using Merkle DAGs), Gateways (HTTP gateways enabling browsers and traditional HTTP clients to access IPFS content without native protocol support), Pinning (explicit content retention mechanism ensuring data is not garbage collected, with pinning services like Pinata and nft.storage), Filecoin integration (incentivized storage network providing verifiable decentralized storage on top of the protocol), DNSLink (linking traditional DNS names to IPFS content for human-readable access), and IPFS Cluster (distributed pinning and replication across multiple nodes for high availability).