How come foundation.app doesn't use a pinning service and they state it is a good thing?

Help IPFS
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Hi all,

I’ve been recently studying how IPFS works and can’t seem to grasp one thing. My understanding is that in order for a file to be accessible via IPFS for a prolonged period of time there needs to be at least one node pinning the file. However, foundation.app, one of the biggest NFT websites state that

“Foundation is a non-custodial platform which means that, as a collector you’re not dependent on a centralized server. When creators upload their artwork on Foundation, it will be sent to IPFS so the network of nodes participating in the IPFS protocol can host it. Foundation’s smart contract will point to IPFS with a link to the image, URL, description, and title. This means that all of the artwork you collect on our platform will always exist, independent of Foundation’s own infrastructure.”

Seems like they are bragging about not using a pinning service? How can this be? Can a file be forever stored via IPFS when not pinned by any specific node and just freely uploaded to IPFS?

Thanks a lot for your help!

PS Here is the rest of info regarding IPFS from the foundation.app website
" Foundation deploys an Ethereum contract that mints and tracks all the tokens on the platform, and that contract will be your go-to source for finding any information you need about the artworks, including the content identifier (or CID) file hash for IPFS. Once an artwork is on Foundation, you can look up the artwork’s tokenID in the contract and then access the content identifier for the metadata through Etherscan — an explorer that indexes all of the transactions, addresses, tokens, prices, and other activities on Ethereum.

Once you have the IPFS hash, you’ll be able to find the content on the IPFS network by using the IPLD explorer: https://explore.ipld.io, where you’ll be linked to one of the public gateways to view the content. The hash lets you find the content from one of the nodes, which you can then download via the gateway."

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I think this is a stretch, they don’t say they do but that they could

“Foundation is a non-custodial platform which means that, as a collector you’re not dependent on a centralized server. When creators upload their artwork on Foundation, it will be sent to IPFS so the network of nodes participating in the IPFS protocol can host it. Foundation’s smart contract will point to IPFS with a link to the image, URL, description, and title. This means that all of the artwork you collect on our platform will always exist, independent of Foundation’s own infrastructure.”

See the critical can I’ve highlighted. From what I understand it’s normal IPFS where anyone could host anything.

I don’t know how their setup work so maybe I’m wrong.

FYI this isn’t completely impossible, you could use filecoin (with FIL+ datacap to make the data free to retrieve) instead of a pinning service.
The issue right now is that Filecoin to IPFS data exchange isn’t very good. But we are working on it.

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Thank you for your answer, I think the part that did not seem truthful was:

" This means that all of the artwork you collect on our platform will always exist, independent of Foundation’s own infrastructure."

I would assume paying for a pinning service or pinning data using a node set up and payed for by this foundation.app would be the only real guarantee the file will actually be available? So if foundation.app goes bust, they stop paying for maintaining their own node or for pinning services the file might eventually become unavailable if nobody downloads it using IPFS so it’s maintained by some other node until garbage collecting? So there actually is no guarantee that the file will always exist independent of their infrastructure? That sounds like they are lying to me, but I’m quite new to this so I apologise if I’m missing something