2022
IPFS, React, Angular, Go
I got a message from an old colleague one day asking if I'd ever heard of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), and whether I'd be interested in building a startup around it. I'd heard of IPFS but didn't know much about how it worked. I said yes anyway, and immediately dove into learning the protocol. We've been building ever since. I won't give too many details yet, but read on to learn what IPFS is and why we think it matters.
an IPFS-enabled satellite
IPFS is a completely different way to do file storage. We're all used to centralized servers holding our data: think AWS or Google Docs. You access those files through a URL, and if the files move, the URL breaks. If AWS or Google go down, your files are unreachable until they're back. IPFS solves this with decentralization: files are stored across many nodes in a network, so if one node goes down, your files can still be retrieved from any other node holding them.
The other clever part is that IPFS doesn't use URLs at all. Every file uploaded to the network gets a content identifier (CID) derived from the file's actual contents. Upload a picture of a flower, and the CID you get back is based on the bytes of that image. If someone else uploads the exact same image, byte for byte, they get the exact same CID. The address is the content, so it can't break the way a URL does. (I'm intentionally leaving out the Filecoin token here, because I don't think it's needed for the protocol to be sustained. Most node operators are users of the network, and that's incentive enough.)
Our startup revolves around pinning: to keep files reliably available on IPFS, you need to pin them to a node so they aren't garbage collected. Most people can't or don't want to run a node 24/7, so we do it for them, behind a simple web interface. I cofounded the venture and build across the stack, from the web app to the services that manage our nodes. We have established competitors, but the market is young, we believe content-based addressing is the future, and we think we can deliver it cheaper without sacrificing features.
I'll update this page as we get closer to sharing more. In the meantime, if decentralized storage interests you, IPFS is worth an afternoon of reading. It's one of those ideas that seems obvious in hindsight.
