What is web3.storage

Content uploaded to web3.storage is stored on our instance of Elastic IPFS, a cloud-native implementation of IPFS that our team wrote to stay reliable and performant with the scale of uploads we were seeing. Elastic IPFS ensures your data is continuously and quickly available over the IPFS network once your data is uploaded.

Before data is uploaded, it is packed into a CAR file, which contains your data transformed into a format that IPFS can consume (a directed acyclic graph, or DAG). This is very powerful - in this process, a content address is locally generated for your data, giving you a guarantee of your data's fingerprint. Further, you can construct the DAG in useful ways, like making individual files within your folders or key-value pairs in your JSON have their own content addresses.

Once the CAR file is uploaded, a queue of geographically distributed Filecoin storage providers, selected for performance and availability, bid for the right to store these deals.

The Filecoin storage network provides a global network of storage providers who bid against each other to store data. web3.storage makes a minimum of 5 deals with the various storage providers.

These storage providers generate cryptographic proofs that they are continuously storing your data. The additional redundancy provided by these storage providers is very powerful. You can use the Filecoin blockchain to directly validate that your data is actually physically being stored - without having to take web3.storage’s word for it!

Our aim today is to provide a user-friendly experience that massively reduces the burden for onboarding new use cases into the web3 ecosystem today - while providing an upgrade path for the future.