Hey guys, we’re working on an enterprise communication product and as we’ve started considering IPFS as the ideal platform we came across Hyperledger, and its capability to benefit from the blockchain while maintaining data privacy out of the public chain, which is more assuring for enterprises data privacy, plus the scalability which’s still a bit of concern for IPFS at the moment.
What are your thoughts and if you’re the product manager/engineer which platform you would recommend?
2 Likes
I don’t think you can compare hyperledger vs IPFS in the way you are thinking. Hyperledger is a blockchain solution, while IPFS is a storage/distributed web protocol. In fact you could use IPFS to STORE your blocks!!! Hyperledger and IPFS pair up quite nicely, especially with the ability to define custom transaction types.
IPFS has “scalability” issues, however unless you are dealing with hundreds of terabytes, or insanely large pinsets you probably won’t run into issues, although this can be worked around via using multiple nodes and splitting the data stored across those nodes, reducing the number of pins per node. Unless you’re using experimental features, IPFS is pretty darn stable, and even with things like BadgerDS it’s pretty stable. Right now I think most business, especially those that are building our blockchains like you intend to, probably won’t ever run into scalability issues. By the time their user bases reach a point where it would cause scalability issues with IPFS, it’ll most likely be years from now and by then IPFS will have almost undoubtedly gotten over any scalability issues that are of concern at present. That being said, you can easily design your IPFS infrastructure to accomodate for these issues at present.
6 Likes
Good analysis postable
I am not sure the two are comparable. IPFS is open, basic infrastructure to build distributed applications. Basically the foundation for a more distributed web.
It can be easily used to build blockchain solutions, but can just as easily used to build solutions that are completely unrelated to blockchain. For example my company actyx.io is building a solution that is partition tolerant. Different parts of the system have to continue working if there is a network partition. Classical blockchains are not partition tolerant, so they would not work for us.
Another use case for IPFS is archival and distribution of large quantities of data, which again is completely unrelated to blockchain technology.
So I would say if you want to build a blockchain solution and want to focus on the business aspects, one of the higher level frameworks like hyperledger might be best for you. Maybe you can find one that is based on ipfs. If you want maximum flexibility and have a dev team that is fine with a lower level, protocol/library based approach, building directly on IPFS might be the better choice.
One thing I love about IPFS is the very principled protocol first / language agnostic approach. There are ipfs implementations in go and javascript, but there will soon be many more such as one in rust. And the specifications and protocols are nicely separated from the implementation, so there is little risk of “the implementation becoming the specification”.
For a technology that you want to be around for the next decades, this separation of protocol and implementation is essential.
2 Likes
Hi all,
I agree with postables for example https://developer.brickchain.com/whitepaper/#distributed-storage-and-blockchains develop mobile apps integrity and this company use IPFS to create us hyperledger networks.
Regards
Are you implementing IPFS? Or have you? We are planning implementation and looking for anyone who has successfully done so to discuss pain points, lessons learned, etc.
Even I’m looking for something similar to this. Do let me know if you come across some suitable solutions!