The Internet security company Cloudflare launched a new product to facilitate file storage and navigation on a distributed network. It is a “gateway” to the content of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized storage protocol created in 2014 that aims to change the way we relate to Internet content.
The launch was announced as part of “Crypto Week,” prepared by Cloudflare to underpin a series of new “technologies that use cryptography to improve the Internet.” According to a blog post on the company’s website, Cloudflare will make a new announcement on every day of this week, starting with this Monday, September 17th.
The new “gateway” will not require installing or running specialized software for its use, as is usually necessary to access IPFS. Since many companies that develop smart contracts store their external data in this network, Cloudflare aspires that this tool becomes a platform for the creation of reliable web applications whose contents cannot be censored by governments, companies or other organizations.
Cloudflare launched a ‘gateway’ protocol to decentralized websites on IPFS
The InterPlanetary File System, IPFS, is an open-source project that is built as a distributed architecture, allowing file sharing through a peer-to-peer method, where files are distributed to thousands of computers or nodes across the global network. That makes it difficult for content to be accidentally deleted or lost because it is not centralized in one place. It also eliminates reliance on third-party servers to host content.
As for the functionality of the “gateway” the firm pointed out that accessing the billions of files stored in IPFS, is not the only thing that can be done with this tool.
“With the Cloudflare ‘gateway,’ you can also create a website hosted entirely on IPFS, but still available to your users with a custom domain name. Also, we will issue a free SSL certificate for any site connected to our gateway, ensuring that every website linked to the Cloudflare ‘gateway’ is safe from intrusion and tampering,” said Cloudflare team.
The company pointed out that it is evaluating other distributed ledger technologies as interesting as IPFS, which could benefit from Cloudflare’s new linking tool.
