This is a three part blog series written with the aim of explaining IPFS and the need for it and this is the third part of the series. In the first part we talked about the problems our current Internet paradigm is facing. In the second part, we saw what makes IPFS such a fitting successor to the World Wide Web. In this final blog we talk about the various applications of IPFS in the future.
IPFS stands for “InterPlanetary File System”. The concept of IPFS is just as cool as its name. Dubbed the “Base for the Internet of tomorrow”, IPFS aims for a new paradigm where the world wide web is decentralized as opposed to today’s centralized web.
Although IPFS fundamentally changes the structure of the Web, in now way does it try to change its applications. Today we use the Internet almost everywhere. For communication, education, entertainment, research, banking and many many more reasons, the Web is today’s primary tool. With IPFS based Internet, we can do all of this with the added benefits we talked about in the last blog. Let’s talk about a few of them in detail.
Service based applications-
The Internet is used to provide a diverse number of services to billions of people. Companies like YouTube provide entertainment services to millions at once while companies like Accenture or Infosys provide different kinds of software services. Such services will not be hampered by the decentralized structure of IPFS. In fact, IPFS offers secure, peer-to-peer content delivery — an approach that could save companies millions in bandwidth costs.
Decentralized Storage-
Thanks to the distributed nature of IPFS, a large file or a bunch of large files can be stored in different locations instead of having to store all the related files in a singular place. This gives a lot of freedom for easy bulk storage as data farms are no longer needed. This means cheaper and more efficient storage for everyone.
Banking-
The structure of IPFS is very similar to that of a Blockchain. They both use Merkle Tree like structures as well as cryptographic hashing. This provides a lot of unique properties that cater to the financial sector very well. With IPFS, you can address large amounts of data and put immutable, permanent links in transactions — timestamping and securing content without having to put the data itself on-chain. All records can be stored electronically without the need of a trusted third party. The data will be cryptographically secure which means that it will be virtually impossible to change or forge previous records. This is a huge step in the direction of building trustless systems and it will reap a lot of advantages in the long run.
Research-
For researchers working with large data sets or for those who have to distribute large data sets, IPFS can help provide fast performance and decentralized archiving. This will help researchers from all over the world collaborate seamlessly with minimum time delay. Furthermore, IPFS provides deduplication, high performance, and clustered persistence which means that the chances of data getting lost or corrupted are negligible.
Here we have discussed just a few applications and the changes to them for Web3.0 under the IPFS structure. Since IPFS is still under constant development, new features and elements are still being added to make it an all round, deployable product. A lot of websites or apps have already been developed for the distributed system of IPFS and many of them are being used in the real world to solve real life problems. IPFS is full of potential and will make ground breaking changes in the future. I hope these blogs have given you a rough idea about the working of IPFS and the future of the Internet. You can learn more from the links I’ve provided below. Also do keep an eye out for a bonus blog on IPFS which will focus on the technicalities of it and how to use IPFS Desktop. Hope you have enjoyed these short reads, thank you!