IPFS file handling

Storage Service

To give evan.network applications the possibility to run decentralized applications (ÐAPPs) and store complex and unstructured content, we provide a distributed file system based on IPFS. The evan.network IPFS service is not connected to the public IPFS network, so that your content isn’t spread on other IPFS hosts outside our network. We provide a private IPFS cluster where each AuthorityNode provider spends instances to this IPFS network.

The storage service keeps care that a content asset is replicated up to five times in the cluster.

You can reach the IPFS service for the testcore at https://ipfs.test.evan.network and if you want to reach the public IPFS service for the core blockchain, please got to https://ipfs.evan.network. There are several different APIs available to interact with IPFS, for JavaScript/NodeJS you can use https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs-api

If you store data to the evan.network IPFS storage, you must take care that you encrypt these data in a proper way, so that third parties can’t read your data. To encrypt your data, you can use the evan.network security APIs or implement a custom way.

You can also use a custom IPFS or other datastore to persist your data. In the DBCP guide is the possibility to specify alternative storage providers or you can write custom storage handlers in your ÐAPPs.

Hybrid Storage

Storing large amount of data becomes rather expensive and difficult to execute due to blocksize limitations, so “contents” of contracts are uploaded to the IPFS and only the reference to the file is stored in the contract.

This keeps the amount of data quite small, but allows adding arbitrary large files to contracts without exceeding blockchain limitations or making the transactions too expensive.

ENS addresses can point to a description as well, they keep a reference to a DBCP description, which may point to ÐAPPs and contract data, assets, etc. related to the contract.

The DBCP descriptions are hosted to evan.network IPFS storage, assets can be stored in a custom IPFS or datastore. ÐAPPs may be hosted in a custom location as well, but it is recommended to host these in the evan.network IPFS storage to keep the user experience fluent without having the user switch servers during navigation.