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Brave Integrates IPFS

• Brave.com

Brave Integrates IPFS to Enable Users to Seamlessly Browse The Decentralized Web
Advancing the transition to a decentralized Web, IPFS integration on Brave's desktop browser increases content availability and Internet resilience 

San Francisco, California – January 19, 2021  –  IPFS, the peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the Web faster, safer, and more open, has been integrated into Brave, the fast, privacy-oriented browser, reinventing the Web for users, publishers and advertisers. 

 Incorporated into today's Brave desktop browser update (version 1.19), Brave's 24 million monthly active users can now access content directly from IPFS by resolving ipfs:// URIs via a gateway or installing a full IPFS node in one click. When installing a full node, this will allow Brave users to load content over IPFS' p2p network, hosted on their own node.  Integrating IPFS provides Brave users with a significantly enhanced browsing experience, increasing the availability of content, offloading server costs from the content publisher, and improving the overall resilience of the Internet.

Molly Mackinlay, Project Lead at IPFS said, "Bringing the benefits of the dWeb to Brave users, IPFS' efforts to remove systemic data censorship by corporations and nation-states are now strengthened through the integration with Brave. Today, Web users across the world are unable to access restricted content, including, for example, parts of Wikipedia in Thailand, over 100,000 blocked websites in Turkey, and critical access to COVID-19 information in China. Now anyone with an internet connection can access this critical information through IPFS on the Brave browser."

In a further aspect of the integration, projects building on IPFS such as app development platforms, Textile, and Fleek, will automatically enable anyone to deploy a website or dApp accessible on Brave.

Brian Bondy, CTO and co-founder of Brave, said, "We're thrilled to be the first browser to offer a native IPFS integration with today's Brave desktop browser release. Providing Brave's 1 million+ verified content creators with the power to seamlessly serve content to millions of new users across the globe via a new and secure protocol, IPFS gives users a solution to the problem of centralized servers creating a central point of failure for content access. IPFS' innovative content addressing uses Content Identifiers (CIDs) to form an address based on the content itself as opposed to locating data based on the address of a server. Integrating the IPFS open-source network is a key milestone in making the Web more transparent, decentralized, and resilient." 

SEE ALSO: IPFS Support in Brave

Over the past several months, the Brave team has been working with Protocol Labs on adding InterPlanetary File System (IPFSsupport in Brave. This is the first deep integration of its kind and we're very proud to outline how it works in this post.

IPFS is an exciting technology that can help content creators distribute content without high bandwidth costs, while taking advantage of data deduplication and data replication. There are performance advantages for loading content over IPFS by leveraging its geographically distributed swarm network. IPFS is important for blockchain and for self described data integrity. Previously viewed content can even be accessed offline with IPFS! The IPFS network gives access to content even if it has been censored by corporations and nation-states, such as for example, parts of Wikipedia.

IPFS support allows Brave desktop users to download content by using a content hash, known as the Content identifier (CID). Unlike HTTP(S), there is no specified location for the content.

Each node in the IPFS network is a potential host for the content being requested, and if a node doesn't have the content being requested, the node can retrieve the content from the swarm of peers. The retrieved content is verified locally, removing the need to trust a third party's integrity.

HTTP(S) uses Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to specify the location of content. This system can be easily censored since the content is hosted in specific locations on behalf of a single entity and it is susceptible to Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS). IPFS identifies its content by content paths and/or CIDs inside of Uniform Resource Identifier (URIs) but not URLs.

Overview of IPFS in Brave

Here's an example IPFS URI: 

ipfs://bafybeiemxf5abjwjbikoz4mc3a3dla6ual3jsgpdr4cjr3oz3evfyavhwq/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh.html

As of Brave 1.19.x, you can take this address, paste it in the Brave address bar, and load it.

By default, Brave will load the URI being requested via a public HTTP gateway; however, it will also show an infobar that asks you if you'd like to use a local node to resolve IPFS URIs. If you choose to use a local node, Brave will automatically download go-ipfs as a component and will route future traffic through this node. There is no need to manually manage an IPFS node or use an extension. A user can optionally install the IPFS Companion extension, and it will make a suggestion to use the Brave managed node.

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