Problems or Plans for Storing Digital Assets on IPFS Connected To NFT Smart Contracts

Ecosystem
1

First, thank you for providing all the DAaps in the Crypto world that need the type of storage provided by IPFS… and that includes myself and team as we are developing a NFT Marketplace (niche focused, not to compete with OS).

In our quest to find a long term solution for the permanent storage of the digital assets connected to NFT Smart Contracts, I have come across numerous articles explaining how to do this on IPFS. While it sound all fine and dandy, I can’t help but feel this is not a good thing, especially if IPFS is not designed for this - at least right now.

I would think that if IPFS does allow the storage of digital assets like images, videos, gaming assets, property deeds and so on in the future, the massive costs of maintaining such a system will require IPFS to implement a storage fee of some sort - maybe on actual data storage e.g. $X.XX per MB or GB or ??

Running and maintaining servers is a costly affair. IMO at the speed WEB 3.0 is growing, the demand on IPFS will be huge.

Which leads me to my main question. Is IPFS looking to streamline the process of storing digital assets on it’s system(s) and establishing a fee for this usage.

Why I am asking about fees? We want to build this into our operational costs (and possibly frontend depending on actual costs) now so we are prepared in the future to make sure it has little to no effect on our platform - or changes for the users on our platform e.g. absorb the cost into our marketplace fees if financially feasible.

Any thoughts on this, or maybe developments already underway to address this?

Thanks

2

Thinking of IPFS as a storage provider is misleading. IPFS is mainly a protocol to transfer data. It’s up to individual users whether they want to store data.

Filecoin was developed to solve this issue of how to incentivize people to store data that can be accessed via IPFS.

Textile develops a bridge on Ethereum (Textile: Intro to the Filecoin Bridge) that your Ethereum based smart contract could use to pay for permanent storage of digital assets on Filecoin so that the data can always be retrieved via IPFS.

3

That is exactly what I thought, but you find lots of people providing ways to store these kinds of data on IPFS hence why I made the post… just did not seem like a feasible thing to consider doing or try to do unless IPFS itself was making changes to facilitate this.

Just looking for a permanent storage solution for assets minted on our platform and to make sure IPFS was 100% not an option - now or in the future.

Thanks for the reply.

4

Consider that you can subscribe to a pinning service or run your own IPFS pinning server. This has the benefit of scaling your architecture based on your costs while still taking advantage of the current IPFS ecosystem.