Why IPFS Alone Won't Save Scientific Data

Content addressing is insufficient. IPFS guarantees data integrity via hashes but does not guarantee availability; a file pinned only on a researcher's laptop disappears when it powers down, breaking the link.

The incentive layer is missing. Unlike Filecoin or Arweave, which use crypto-economic incentives for storage, IPFS relies on altruistic pinning, creating a tragedy of the commons for long-term data preservation.

Scientific data requires provenance. A dataset's value includes its immutable origin, peer-review history, and citation trail—metadata that IPFS and IPLD can structure but cannot permanently anchor without a consensus layer like Ethereum or Celestia.

Evidence: The 2023 purge of over 70 million files from Pinata's free tier demonstrated the fragility of unpinned IPFS data, directly threatening research reproducibility.

IPFS lacks economic guarantees. It provides a protocol for data retrieval but does not enforce storage duration. Pinning services like Pinata or Filecoin are separate markets that must be paid to provide persistence.

Content addressing is not a service. A CID guarantees data integrity, not availability. The persistence layer requires a separate incentive structure, similar to how Ethereum's execution layer relies on L2s like Arbitrum for scaling.

Scientific data requires verifiable SLAs. Researchers need cryptographic proof that their datasets are stored for decades, not just discoverable. This is a market for verifiable storage commitments, which protocols alone cannot provide.

Evidence: The Filecoin Virtual Machine introduces programmable storage deals, creating a market where persistence terms and prices are negotiated on-chain, a model absent in base IPFS.

IPFS is a protocol, not a network. It provides content-addressed storage but lacks the economic incentives for long-term persistence, creating a 'cold storage' problem where data disappears without active pinning services like Pinata or Filecoin.

The scientific data lifecycle is complex. Raw data, processed results, and published papers exist in separate silos (e.g., AWS S3, institutional servers, ArXiv) with no cryptographic linkage, making reproducibility and provenance tracking impossible.

Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs) are the missing layer. They provide the portable, self-sovereign identity framework that IPFS lacks, allowing datasets to be cryptographically signed, attributed, and linked across storage backends.

Evidence: Over 99% of scientific datasets referenced in publications lack a persistent, machine-readable identifier, and a 2021 study found that 30% of supplementary data links are dead within a decade.

Pinning services are rent, not ownership. Commercial pinning services like Pinata or Filebase provide a centralized point of failure, converting a decentralized storage promise into a traditional SaaS subscription. The data disappears when the grant funding ends or the startup pivots.

The incentive is misaligned with the data's value. A pinning service's revenue model is based on bytes stored, not the intellectual or historical value of the data. There is no mechanism to financially reward long-term preservation of a critical genome sequence versus temporary NFT metadata.

This creates a data graveyard. Projects like Arweave highlight the flaw by embedding permanent storage into its blockchain-based endowment. In IPFS, unpinned data becomes garbage-collected, making scientific datasets vulnerable to the same ephemeral fate as yesterday's social media posts.

Evidence: The 2023 shutdown of Textile's ThreadDB pinning service, which stranded academic projects, demonstrates the systemic risk. Reliance on altruistic nodes or temporary grants is not a data preservation strategy.

IPFS lacks guaranteed persistence. Content on the InterPlanetary File System is only available while a node pins it, creating a tragedy of the commons where no one is financially incentivized to host obscure datasets. This is not a storage solution but a content-addressed distribution layer.

Social consensus is a weak root of trust. Relying on community vigilance for data integrity is brittle and non-scalable. It fails against Sybil attacks and lacks the cryptographic finality of on-chain state verification provided by systems like Celestia's data availability sampling.

The proof-of-existence gap is fatal. A CID (Content Identifier) in a smart contract proves a file existed, not that it is retrievable. This creates a verification-decoupling problem where the record is permanent but the data is ephemeral, unlike Arweave's permanent storage endowment model.

Evidence: The Filecoin network exists precisely to solve IPFS's incentive failure, proving the base layer is insufficient. Projects like Ocean Protocol build data marketplaces on top of Filecoin and compute layers, not raw IPFS, to ensure commercial-grade availability.