What You Missed at IPFS Pinning Summit

Last week, Protocol Labs gave us the opportunity to participate in the first ever IPFS Pinning Summit to share the past, present, and future for IPFS as an essential component of Infura’s Web3 development suite. For those of you who are familiar with Infura, you will know we have a long history of support for IPFS and we’d like to thank Protocol Labs for the opportunity to share our progress. Here’s a quick recap of what we spoke about.

Infura was formed in 2016 initially as a project to provide shared Ethereum node infrastructure to support other projects within ConsenSys. By providing a connection to the Ethereum network via an API endpoint, Infura freed up developers from having to manage that infrastructure themselves. While at the time, running an Ethereum node wasn't particularly difficult, scaling an application meant more nodes, more disk space, full-time infrastructure engineers, and ultimately more costs. We quickly realized that a service such as Infura would make building and scaling applications on Ethereum easier, and would be incredibly valuable for the ecosystem as a whole.

Ethereum is great for computation, but what about storage?

As decentralized, Web3 development design patterns began to emerge, it was quickly obvious that while Ethereum provided trustless computation, truly decentralized applications would need a storage solution to complement it. The S3 to EC2 if you will. Based on this, we decided to set up one of the first public IPFS APIs and Gateway alongside our Ethereum API to build the foundation of our Web3 development suite.

Over the last 4 years, we have worked with our community of developers to explore exciting use-cases, debug common issues, and serve IPFS as a key part of our Web3 strategy. We have worked with users storing documents, art assets, music, videos, social network information, photos, and so much more.

Our IPFS Service Today

We have primarily focused on making improvements to our underlying IPFS architecture in order to support the amazing adoption of this service.  We support pinning and accessing pinned content directly via the API and allow users to access data pinned across the IPFS network via the Gateway. We have supported over 40 million unique objects and are currently handling over 2 TB of data transfer per day.

We have also committed to providing contributions to the open source IPFS community. You can learn more about two of our internal tools, ipfs-pump and go-ipfs-datadog-plugin here.

Check out our documentation for a full list of our supported functionality.

What’s Next?

Looking forward, we are preparing for the launch of our premium IPFS product. This new product will expand on the current API and Gateway functionality, full dashboard and the latest auth integration, and an overall more reliable and scalable solution for developers with production ready applications. We will have much more on this in the coming months.

Subscribe to our newsletter so you can be the first to know when our new IPFS product has launched. As always, if you have questions or feature requests, you can join our community or reach out to us directly.