Cloudflare announces support for distributed web-based IPFS

Cloudflare, the 3rd largest content delivery network (CDN), announced a huge first step towards its aim of supporting distributed web technologies. Per their release:

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"Today we’re excited to introduce Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway, an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer. We hope that our gateway, hosted at cloudflare-ipfs.com, will serve as the platform for many new highly-reliable and security-enhanced web applications. The IPFS Gateway is the first product to be released as part of our Distributed Web Gateway project, which will eventually encompass all of our efforts to support new distributed web technologies...

IPFS is a peer-to-peer file system composed of thousands of computers around the world, each of which stores files on behalf of the network. These files can be anything: cat pictures, 3D models, or even entire websites. Over 5,000,000,000 files had been uploaded to IPFS already...

Cloudflare is excited about the possibilities introduced by these new technologies and we see our gateway as a tool to help bridge the gap between the traditional web and the new generation of distributed web technologies headlined by IPFS."

The commitment of a market-leading multi-billion dollar CDN to support peer-to-peer data movement vs. centralized hosting shows the incredible potential for the distributed web to improve web products.

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Mike Dudas is one of the founders of The Block and was the CEO until April 2020 and a board member until April 2021. Prior to starting The Block, Mike was co-founder and CRO of Button, the leading global, mobile performance marketing platform. Mike is a builder of mobile commerce businesses, having worked at Google, Braintree/Venmo and PayPal. Early in his career, Mike worked in corporate M&A and strategy for Disney. Mike earned a BA from Stanford and an MBA from Kellogg.