  Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For
example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations,
and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud
infrastructures. In response to this, the "Decentralized Web" attempts to
distribute ownership and operation of web services more evenly. This paper
describes the design and implementation of the largest and most widely used
Decentralized Web platform - the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) - an
open-source, content-addressable peer-to-peer network that provides distributed
data storage and delivery. IPFS has millions of daily content retrievals and
already underpins dozens of third-party applications. This paper evaluates the
performance of IPFS by introducing a set of measurement methodologies that
allow us to uncover the characteristics of peers in the IPFS network. We reveal
presence in more than 2700 Autonomous Systems and 152 countries, the majority
of which operate outside large central cloud providers like Amazon or Azure. We
further evaluate IPFS performance, showing that both publication and retrieval
delays are acceptable for a wide range of use cases. Finally, we share our
datasets, experiences and lessons learned.
