  Inefficient data management has been the Achilles heel of blockchain-based
decentralized applications (dApps). An off-chain storage layer, which lies
between the application and the blockchain layers, can improve space efficiency
and data availability with erasure codes and decentralized maintenance. This
paper presents two fundamental components of such storage layer designed and
implemented for the IPFS network. The IPFS Community is a component built on
top of the IPFS network that encodes and decodes data before uploading to the
network. Since data is encoded with alpha entanglement codes, the solution
requires less storage space than the native IPFS solution which replicates data
by pinning content with the IPFS Cluster. To detect and repair failures in a
timely manner, we introduce the monitoring and repair component. This novel
component is activated by any node and distributes the load of repairs among
various nodes. These two components are implemented as pluggable modules, and
can, therefore, be easily migrated to other distributed file systems by
adjusting the connector component.
