Cardano IPFS chronicles 2022

Continue the support of ipfs.blockfrost.dev gateway, which is a widely used IPFS gateway in the Cardano ecosystem.

We are the creators of Blockfrost.io, creating services and tools lowering barriers to entry for developers. We have been operating the largest IPFS gateway in Cardano serving more than 800 TB of data and almost 1 million of unique visitors a month.

[IMPACT]

The IPFS gateway ipfs.blockfrost.dev has been used in number of different critical wallets and tools, such as:

• pool.pm
• spacebudz.io
• jpg.store
• cnft.io
• Nami wallet
• adapools.org

... and much more.

The throughput of the service is around 500Mbps, it serves more than 100 TB of NFT data and more than 50 millions of requests a month.

The public IPFS gateway is helping developers to focus on developing their application without having to spend time and resources on hosting and maintaining their own gateway.

We are going to provide monthly updates about the number of data transferred and number of unique clients as well as number of request on our twitter.

If the growing adoption of Cardano continues, we might run out of budget sooner than we expected. In the requested budget, we use the current numbers + 12% expected grow.

If not funded, we will have to shut down the service and each of the providers will have to run their own node.

[FEASIBILITY]

As the service is live now, the proposal is just to keep it running with community support and make it affordable for developers to use it.

For our public IPFS gateway, we're running 3 instances across the globe with $400 monthly cost each (computing, traffic and disk).

In addition, our CDN traffic costs $1,000 monthly.

The cost of the service is therefore $2,200 monthly. We are asking for budget for one year.

We provide the maintenance of this service for free.

Five Binaries is an infrastructure development company. We’re Cardano pioneers - with the first Cardano block minted on an aeroplane, first stake pool on the ITN and the first Shelley transaction on the mainnet.

We are the creators of Blockfrost.io. We are participants in Alonzo since the Blue testnet and we are Plutus pioneers.

We are trusted by the community, as we have been granted already 20+ proposals across several funds in the past. To find out our progress on making the Cardano infrastructure better, check our Catalyst dashboard page at https://catalyst.fivebinaries.com/.

We are trusted by customers such as Emurgo, Trezor or Cardano Foundation. To get in touch or find more information about us, please visit https://fivebinaries.com/.

We have implemented the Cardano support into the Trezor Suite.

[AUDITABILITY]

Monthly reports will be posted on our Twitter page, as mentioned above.

Success means continuation of this critical infrastructure component.

This proposal is the continuation of the IPFS Chronicles we have submitted last year, with the focus on the public IPFS gateway, as that component has had the most success and is the most used.