IPFS, the distributed file system and content addressing protocol, has been around since 2015, and Cloudflare has been a user and operator since 2018, when we began operating a public IPFS gateway. Today, we are announcing our plan to transition this gateway traffic to the IPFS Foundation’s gateway, maintained by the Interplanetary Shipyard (“Shipyard”) team, and discussing what it means for users and the future of IPFS gateways.
As announced in April 2024, many of the IPFS core developers and maintainers now work within a newly created, independent entity called Interplanetary Shipyard after transitioning from Protocol Labs, where IPFS was invented and incubated. By operating as a collective, ongoing maintenance and support of important protocols like IPFS are now even more community-owned and managed. We fully support this “exit to community” and are excited to support Shipyard as they build more great infrastructure for the open web.
On May 14th, 2024, we will begin to transition traffic that comes to Cloudflare’s public IPFS gateway to the IPFS Foundation’s gateway at ipfs.io or dweb.link. Cloudflare’s public IPFS gateway is just one of many – part of a distributed ecosystem that also includes Pinata, eth.limo, and many more. Visit the IPFS Public Gateway Checker to see the other publicly available IPFS gateways.
Cloudflare believes in helping build a better Internet for all and an accessible and private Internet, principles that Protocol Labs, IPFS, and Shipyard all share. We believe the IPFS gateway transition will boost ecosystem collaboration, increase protocol resiliency, and ensure healthy stewardship and governance. Cloudflare is proud to be a partner of the IPFS Project and Shipyard in this transition and will continue to help sponsor their work as gateway stewards.
What happens next
All traffic using the cloudflare-ipfs.com or cf-ipfs.com hostname(s) will continue to work without interruption and be redirected to ipfs.io or dweb.link until August 14th, 2024, at which time the Cloudflare hostnames will no longer connect to IPFS and all users must switch the hostname they use to ipfs.io or dweb.link to ensure no service interruption takes place. If you are using either of the Cloudflare hostnames, please be sure to switch to one of the new ones as soon as possible ahead of the transition date to avoid any service interruptions!
It is important to Cloudflare, IPFS, and Shipyard that this transition is completed seamlessly and with as little impact to users as possible. With that in mind, there is no change to the amount or type of end user information that is visible to either Cloudflare, the IPFS Foundation, or Shipyard before or after the completion of this transition.
We’re excited to see further development and projects from the IPFS community and play our part in helping those applications be secure, performant, and reliable!
About Shipyard
Interplanetary Shipyard is an engineering collective that delivers user agency through technical advancements in IPFS and libp2p. As the core maintainers of open source projects in the Interplanetary Stack (including IPFS and libp2p implementations such as Kubo, Rainbow, Boxo, Helia, and go-libp2p/js-libp2p), and supporting performance measurement tooling (Probelab), they are committed to open source innovation and building bridges between traditional web frameworks and the decentralized ecosystem. To achieve this, their engineers work alongside technical teams in web2 and web3 to promote adoption and drive practical applications.