Cloudflare Launches Decentralized Web Gateway at Its First 'Crypto Week'

Internet security provider Cloudflare is introducing a new product to help users more easily access the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), the decentralized storage protocol developed by Protocol Labs.

In a blog post Monday, Cloudflare announced it was launching a "Crypto Week," where it will announce "support for a new technology that uses cryptography to make the internet better" every day. The first of these technologies is a portal to more easily access IPFS, as well as build websites on top of the technology.

In a second post, the company explains that the peer-to-peer nature of IPFS provides a number of redundancies for users trying to access a specific website or piece of data. The first is that content can be accessible even if a node goes down, whereas a single server failure might bring down a website on the existing internet.

The second feature revolves around the fact that users can request data using hash values, rather than IP addresses, which acts as a method of ensuring the data received is what was requested, according to the post.

To ensure users can access data stored through IPFS, Cloudflare is offering a gateway which delivers content using Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), the dominant protocol used to transfer data.

The post explained:

While Cloudflare's product is allowing access to a decentralized protocol, the company noted that users can still report abusive or harmful content, indicating that it may be able to revoke its portal to any websites providing such content.

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