Interplanetary Consensus and Weather Mining: What IPFS Looks Like Today

In May 2014, programmer Juan Benet founded Protocol Labs. By January of the following year, the project, supported by the Y Combinator startup accelerator, introduced IPFS. Looking back on a journey spanning almost a decade, Benet shared:

“Starting with a small amount from Y Combinator, around $120,000, I then spent roughly six months, or perhaps eight months, working on IPFS, having less than $0. I was absolutely and completely broke.”

By 2016, IPFS had become one of the most-used protocols, and the Protocol Labs team continued releasing numerous products. The most up-to-date of them for ForkLog readers is explained by Sergey Golubenko.

What It’s About

IPFS is a file system—a protocol and network for decentralized storage and data exchange. In its designers’ view, it will be more robust and efficient than traditional storage.

The central idea here is decentralization. Unlike traditional systems where files are stored on central servers, IPFS uses a distributed network of nodes, each of which can store and relay parts of files, as happens, for example, with BitTorrent.

Content Identifiers (CIDs) play a central role here — unique identifiers contained in every IPFS file. A CID is created from a hash of the file’s content, ensuring data uniqueness and originality.

Participants in IPFS interact with each other, forming a dynamic network where nodes can serve as storage and pass files to other nodes. The system uses routing algorithms that allow efficient discovery and retrieval of files in the network based on their CIDs.

According to the blog of Protocol Labs, since IPFS’s launch it has been used to organise and distribute many exabytes of data worldwide, with 250,000 P2P nodes and more than 2.5 million daily users.

Those who most often turn to the protocol are “technologists, archivists, activists, artists, scientists”. IPFS addresses a range of problems—from preserving historical documents to enabling communication in conditions of censorship or weak signal.

For example, after the Turkish authorities blocked Wikipedia in 2017, activists migrated it to IPFS, and residents again gained unrestricted access to information.

Filecoin and Beyond

One of IPFS’s most popular projects is Filecoin, a decentralized data-storage solution. Its appeal was aided by a monetization model and by the community’s ability to participate in mining the FIL token and in protocol development.

Prefacing potential claims, Protocol Labs in 2017 created SAFT — a form of agreement between investors and the project team that gives contributors the right to future tokens to be issued upon reaching certain development milestones.

This instrument was designed to ensure legal clarity and compliance with securities laws. This did not protect Filecoin from claims by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, however it helped attract enough investors.

All the project plans sounded revolutionary, ambitious, and perhaps utopian. But after almost a decade, there is genuinely something to surprise. In recent remarks at LabWeek23 in Istanbul, the Filecoin team unveiled its development plan:

• to build the world’s largest decentralized data storage system;
• to give users constant fast access to information and ensure its secure storage;
• to bring compute closer to the data, making available web-scale applications.

The next project the company is betting big on is Libp2p. It grew out of IPFS to become a networked P2P layer for Web3.

It features modular components for node discovery, routing, transport, NAT traversal. To date, more than 20 of its implementations power IPFS, Filecoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Polkadot and other L1- and L2-blockchains.

Another promising project is Bacalhau, a platform for public, transparent, and, optionally, verifiable distributed computing that helps solve parallel data-processing tasks. This architecture is known as Compute over Data (CoD) — the concept whereby computations are performed directly at the storage location, eliminating the need to transfer data to centralized servers or the cloud.

In December 2022, the Bacalhau team released Beta v1. By the end of 2023, engineers expect a fully distributed data-processing system that runs on any device.

Weather and Space

WeatherXM — a project aimed at studying planetary weather conditions and collecting data into a decentralized network under community governance. It now spans over 70 countries, where weather stations transmit data around the clock. Each station owner earns WXM tokens in exchange for providing weather and climate data. It amounts to a kind of “weather mining.”

Protocol Labs is also collaborating with Cryptosat, which builds small satellites that provide Web3 cryptographic infrastructure. Through such equipment, effective communication means are created, and the necessary level of confidentiality and trust is achieved.

“After launch, there is no physical access to the satellites, which prevents sophisticated side-channel attacks, and software running on the satellite generates digital signatures directly in space, enabling fast and secure verification,” write representatives of Cryptosat.

To date, the company has successfully placed three satellites into orbit: Crypto1, Crypto2 and Crypto3. The company plans to collaborate with Protocol Labs, adding IPFS nodes to the equipment on its satellites. Cryptosat believes that in the next 5–10 years all major blockchains will use space-based infrastructure in some way.

Interplanetary Consensus

In spring 2023, Protocol Labs provided information about a new tool — IPC (InterPlanetary Consensus). As the company states, with IPC decentralized applications can already reach planetary scale thanks to recursively scalable subnets, transactions in under a second, reliable compute workloads and high-performance WebAssembly designed with developers’ requirements in mind. It also enables computing within the Filecoin network itself.

Summarising the above, one can conclude that the company, firstly, has gathered around it a huge community of enthusiasts, engineers, and ordinary users. Secondly, through space-related collaboration, the project has attracted multimillion-dollar investments.

Whether IPFS will be the ‘Next HTTP’ remains to be seen, but one can already say that its chances are high. At least Filecoin, which five years ago seemed like another L1 with mining on home HDDs, now presents itself in a completely different form: TVL of the coin is now above $140 million and after the launch of the FVM on the mainnet it is only growing.

Despite all these successes, the protocol itself remains vulnerable to criticism, as almost ten years after its launch it is still in an alpha stage. Analysts also point to IPFS security issues and misuse by bad actors, in particular for phishing attacks. Also among the reasons hindering real mass adoption of the protocol, they cite the rigidity of the global Internet infrastructure.