What is IPFS?
IPFS, which is an abbreviation for Inter Planetary File System, is a decentralized peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that is used to store data in a decentralized manner.
It is widely used within the blockchain space, as storing data directly on the blockchain is rather expensive. The dApps usually store data on IPFS and record the immutable hash of this data on the blockchain.
IPFS might be an odd concept at first, we recommend spending some time reading their excellent documentation to learn more. https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/.
Where is this data really stored?
That is the problem we are trying to solve. This data is usually stored on different nodes, but over time, if the data is not being accessed, it is pruned from the network. To prevent this, there is a concept of data "pinning", which allows you to save this data on your server and prevent its deletion over time.
Where does Blockfrost.io come in all of this?
At Blockfrost.io, we provide IPFS support to developers. However, we realized that preserving the data early on is important for the future generations and the Cardano ecosystem.
Since day one, we started pinning all IPFS data posted on the Cardano ecosystem as a community service. So, if you as a developer ever use IPFS on Cardano, we will keep your data from ever disappearing.
At the moment of writing this proposal, we are storing over 65,000 (!) different IPFS files from the community, which generates over 5TB of traffic per week by more than 90 000 unique visitors. We anticipate this number to grow, and would like to ask the community to participate in this service.
Deliverables and budget
We would like to ask for funding of for a virtual servers Europe, Asia, Americas and Australia.
We predict the associated cost for this year is $320 per server, which totals to $1 280 a month for servers and $200 monthly subscription for CDN, resulting in $1 680 monthly.
We ask the funding to cover the infrastructure cost only. The team at Blockfrost.io will provide their time keeping it up and running as a service to this incredible community.
The funds will be gradually dispensed on a monthly basis as we deliver the service, and the cost proofs (invoices) will be shared with the Catalyst team if requested.
We will build the clustered services within 10 days of receiving the funding. We aim for a 99% of cluster SLA that we will consider a success. We predict to have 1M+ unique visitors monthly by the 3 months of deploying the service. We are asking for a half-year of funding and will provide uptime metrics to the community. We hope to extend the funding in the future if the community is happy with our performance.
Relevant experience
Five Binaries is an infrastructure development company. We're Cardano pioneers - with the first Cardano block minted on an aeroplane, first stake pool on the ITN and the first Shelley transaction on the mainnet.
We are the creators of Blockfrost.io. We have also experience with deploying Yoroi backend and contributed several changes to the backend itself too.
We are also winner of several proposals in Fund 3, such as Go serialization library for Cardano or Cardano Metadata Oracles. We are trusted by customers such as Emurgo, Trezor or Cardano Foundation. To get in touch or find more information about us, please visit https://fivebinaries.com/.
