  Web3 aims at creating a decentralized platform that is competitive with
modern cloud infrastructures that support today's Internet. However, Web3 is
still limited, supporting only applications in the domains of content creation
and sharing, decentralized financing, and decentralized communication. This is
mainly due to the technologies supporting Web3: blockchain, IPFS, and libp2p,
that although provide a good collection of tools to develop Web3 applications,
are still limited in terms of design and performance. This motivates the need
to better understand these technologies as to enable novel optimizations that
can push Web3 to its full potential. Unfortunately, understanding the current
behavior of a fully decentralized large-scale distributed system is a difficult
task, as there is no centralized authority that has full knowledge of the
system operation.
  To this end, in this paper we characterize the workload of IPFS, a key
enabler of Web3. To achieve this, we have collected traces from accesses
performed by users to one of the most popular IPFS gateways located in North
America for a period of two weeks. Through the fine analysis of these traces,
we gathered the amount of requests to the system, and found the providers of
the requested content. With this data, we characterize both the popularity of
requested and provided content, as well as their geo-location (by matching IP
address with the MaxMind database). Our results show that most of the requests
in IPFS are only to a few different content, that is provided by large portion
of peers in the system. Furthermore, our analysis also shows that most requests
are provided by the two largest portions of providers in the system, located in
North America and Europe. With these insights, we conclude that the current
IPFS architecture is sub-optimal and propose a research agenda for the future.
