LiquidEOS has announced a project that will make dApps more decentralized than ever before. The group is utilizing IPFS, a new web protocol from hosting giant Cloudflare, to host EOS dApps over a decentralized filesystem.
LiquidEOS’s new platform, that may be simply called “the dApp Network”, enables users to take over dApps that never go offline. Meanwhile, developers who host their apps at the network may benefit from lower hosting costs.
Backend vs. Frontend Decentralization
In general, dApps are decentralized around the backend: this means an app’s underlying smart contracts are executed by nodes over a blockchain. Although dApps are usually frozen as a consequence of security issues, most of them operate providing the blockchain is functional. As a result social, legal, or political pressure cannot close up a dApp.
In that regard, dApps are virtually unstoppable. However, dApp frontends commonly are not decentralized or hosted on your blockchain. Users typically access dApps through the web page that’s hosted for the traditional, centralized web server. Unfortunately, websites might be hacked or suffer downtime.
There are techniques to mitigate these complaints: multiple sites can mirror a dApp, and developers may offer downloadable apps, these kinds of are not universal practices. The perfect solution to downtime should be used, and this is this challenge that LiquidEOS is solving.
By using IPFS, the target audience is allowing a network of peers to defend myself against the task of hosting dApp frontends. As LiquidEOS explains:
“IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system-In save money on groceries, IPFS is similar to the online market place, but IPFS can be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm-. IPFS is without single point of failure, and nodes need not trust one not to tamper with data while in transit.”
Apart from that, devices will remain precisely the same: dApps will continue to exercise on the EOS blockchain behind the scenes, and users continue to seamlessly access dApps through their browser.
EOS is not the only blockchain project for taking advantage of Cloudflare’s IPFS protocol. Other crypto-related projects, including the Ethereum-powered CryptoKitties, also decide to use the IPFS network to help keep their assets. Additonally, Sia and Decentraland are reportedly making use of the network.