Why IPFS Alone Is Not a Storage Strategy

IPFS nodes voluntarily host data. Without a paid pinning service or your own infrastructure, files can vanish. This is not a storage protocol; it's a discovery layer.

• No SLA for persistence – Data disappears when nodes go offline.
• High operational overhead – Running your own reliable IPFS cluster defeats the purpose of decentralization.
• Real-world impact – NFT metadata and dApp frontends become broken links.

These are storage blockchains with cryptoeconomic guarantees for long-term persistence. They complete the stack where IPFS leaves off.

• Arweave's Permaweb – One-time fee for ~200 years of storage via endowment model.
• Filecoin's Marketplace – Verifiable deals and slashing for provider failures.
• Strategic pairing – Use IPFS for caching/discovery, Arweave/Filecoin for the canonical source.

IPFS does not natively incentivize data retrieval. Serving files at scale requires paying for bandwidth, which centralized pinning services monetize.

• 'Hot' storage is expensive – Serving high-traffic assets (e.g., popular NFT collections) costs real money.
• No built-in payment rails – No micro-payments for data retrieval between peers.
• Creates centralization pressure – Projects default to a few large pinning services (Pinata, Infura).

Decentralized storage networks that explicitly pay nodes for both storage and bandwidth. This aligns economics with reliability.

• Storj's satellite model – Manages payments and audit, uses erasure coding for durability.
• Sia's smart contracts – Hosts post collateral, get paid in Siacoin for proven uptime & transfer.
• Predictable pricing – Clear, often lower-than-AWS costs for egress bandwidth.

Blockchains need state (smart contract variables), not just file storage. IPFS cannot host mutable, consensus-critical data.

• Immutability mismatch – IPFS hashes break if data changes; blockchain state updates constantly.
• No execution – IPFS cannot run logic or validate transitions.
• Architectural dead-end – Trying to build stateful apps directly on IPFS leads to complex, fragile workarounds.

For application state, you need a blockchain. The storage layer holds large, static assets; the execution layer manages mutable logic and value.

• Ethereum + IPFS/Arweave – Classic pattern: NFT metadata on IPFS, ownership & payments on-chain.
• Solana's Ledger Size – Compresses state via proof-of-history, but large assets still go off-chain.
• Modular future – Celestia for data availability, Ethereum for settlement, Arweave for permanent storage.

IPFS nodes are not obligated to store your data. Without a paid pinning service or your own infrastructure, files become unavailable when the last node goes offline. This makes it unsuitable for critical state or asset storage.

• No Persistence Guarantee: Data disappears without active pinning.
• Hidden Centralization: Reliance on a few commercial pinning services (e.g., Pinata, Infura) reintroduces a single point of failure.
• Cost Opaqueness: Long-term storage costs are unpredictable and borne by the application, not the network.

Fetching data from IPFS is a best-effort search across a distributed hash table (DHT). There is no SLA for retrieval speed, leading to highly variable performance that breaks user-facing applications.

• Slow Cold Reads: Can take 10+ seconds to locate and fetch content from a distant peer.
• No Incentive to Serve: Peers have no economic reason to prioritize or cache your data.
• Contrast with CDNs: Compared to <100ms global CDN latency, IPFS is orders of magnitude slower for uncached content.

While IPFS hashes (CIDs) verify content integrity after retrieval, they provide no proof of storage or availability over time. This is insufficient for DeFi, NFTs, or DAOs that require verifiable data commitments on-chain.

• No Storage Proofs: Cannot cryptographically prove a file is stored and accessible.
• Oracle Risk: Bridging IPFS CIDs to smart contracts requires trusted oracles.
• Solution Pattern: Projects like Filecoin, Arweave, and Celestia use cryptographic proofs (PoRep, PoS) and economic staking to provide verifiable, persistent storage layers.

The correct pattern is to use IPFS as a content distribution layer atop a persistent storage base layer and a high-performance caching layer. This mirrors the internet's evolution from bare servers to cloud platforms.

• Base Layer (Persistence): Filecoin (contracts), Arweave (permanence).
• Caching/Distribution Layer (Performance): IPFS for P2P transport, Cloudflare IPFS Gateway, or specialized CDNs.
• Verification Layer (Trust): On-chain proofs or light clients like Laconic for state verification.

IPFS nodes are not incentivized to store your data. Relying on a single pinning service like Pinata or Infura reintroduces the centralization and custodial risk you aimed to avoid.

• Data Loss Risk: If your pinning service fails or you stop paying, your data disappears.
• Censorship Vector: A centralized pinner can unilaterally remove content.
• No Guarantees: No SLAs for persistence or retrieval speed.

Decentralized storage networks provide cryptoeconomic guarantees for long-term data availability. This is the missing piece for a complete strategy.

• Filecoin: Offers verifiable, renewable storage deals with a competitive marketplace.
• Arweave: Provides permanent storage via a one-time, upfront payment and endowment model.
• Hybrid Approach: Use IPFS for caching/retrieval and Filecoin/Arweave for persistent anchoring.

IPFS retrieval speed depends on the random altruism of the network. This is unacceptable for user-facing dApps requiring sub-second load times.

• Cold Data: Unpopular content can have latency >10s or be completely unavailable.
• No QoS: No built-in mechanism to prioritize or guarantee retrieval performance.
• User Experience Killer: Erratic performance destroys product usability.

Layer performant, incentivized caching atop the decentralized storage layer to achieve web2-grade performance.

• Services like Fleek, Spheron, or 4EVERLAND: Automatically mirror IPFS content to global CDNs.
• Content Addressing Persists: The underlying CID remains the source of truth.
• Guaranteed Uptime: Achieve >99.9% availability and <100ms global latency for hot content.

Raw file storage is insufficient. Modern applications need mutable pointers, access control, and real-time updates—none of which IPFS provides natively.

• Static CIDs: Updating a file changes its CID, breaking all previous links.
• No Permissions: Data is public to anyone who has the CID.
• No Query Layer: Cannot search or filter data stored across CIDs.

Use protocol layers that abstract away storage complexity and provide application-ready primitives.

• Ceramic Network: Provides mutable, versioned data streams anchored to a blockchain.
• Tableland: Offers SQL tables with on-chain access control, stored on IPFS/Filecoin.
• Lit Protocol: Enables encrypted data and conditional decryption for private data on IPFS.