In addition to IPFS and Filecoin, how does Protocol Labs improve the entire Internet - IPLD

People who know about Filecoin and IPFS must be familiar with " Protocol Labs ". If you have visited their official website, you can see the following introduction: The mission of Protocol Labs is to promote breakthroughs in computing, build the next generation of the Internet, and ultimately advance human development .

The Internet is one of the most important technologies for mankind today. If we want to improve it, the answer is Web3. Filecoin and IPFS build the underlying storage framework of Web3, but Protocol Labs does more than that. In building Web3, they also proposed projects including IPLD, libp2p, Multiformats, drand, etc., in order to better develop Web3.

Next, let’s take a closer look at them and what role these projects play in Filecoin. In today’s article, let’s first learn about IPLD.

IPLD stands for InterPlanetary Linked Data . First of all, we need to understand what "linked data" is. This concept was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web. It is the original Web3 (different from the web3 we often say now) , which is one of the concepts of the semantic web.

In the past Internet context, it is a method of publishing, sharing, and connecting various resources on the Web through linkable URIs . It uses the Web to create semantic associations between different data sources. For example, in life sciences, it can discover new drugs through such semantic associations; in the news media industry, it can create connections between past news content for more accurate searches, etc.

And what does it mean in the current Web3 environment?

You can link the information of open source software with the transaction of virtual currency, so that you can use the blockchain to record the change records, submission time and information, etc. You can also link Ethereum smart contracts with IPFS, so that every modification and execution of smart contracts can be stored on IPFS. You can refer to the use case in this article . It is just not linked by URI, but addressed by hash value, so it can be applied to all protocols that use hash value as the means of addressing .

Filecoin and IPFS use IPLD for blockchain data structure. It is located under the two systems and is mainly used to define data and model data. Through it, data from different fields can be easily accessed .

It can make cryptographic hash data interoperable in distributed systems, establish a data model for the content-addressable web, and handle the heavy work of storing data on the chain and creating hash links (i.e. content identifiers, or CIDs) .

In its original design, IPLD was designed as a tool that can achieve maximum practicality, supporting multiple programming languages ​​and representing the diversity of data encoding. Its goal is to achieve a universally addressable and linkable decentralized data structure, which in turn can support more decentralized applications . It has the following more notable features:

1 Normalized Data Model : A self-contained, descriptive model that uniquely identifies any hash-based data structure and ensures that the same logical object always maps to the same bit sequence.

2 Protocol independence : IPLD combines independent systems together, making integration with existing protocols simple.

3. Upgradable : With multiformat support , IPLD is easily upgradeable and will grow with your favorite protocol.

4. Interoperability across formats : Represent IPLD objects in various serializable formats, such as JSON, CBOR, YAML, XML, etc., making IPLD easy to use in any framework.

5 Backward compatibility : Non-intrusive resolvers make IPLD easy to integrate into existing work.

6 Namespaces for all protocols : IPLD allows you to explore data seamlessly across protocols through a common namespace, combined with hash-based data structures.

There are many things to say about IPLD. Here we can first learn about its support for Filecoin. In Filecoin, the concept of IPLD content addressing itself, codecs such as DAG-CBOR, Content Addressable aRchives (CAR) file format, and protocols such as GraphSync are mainly introduced.

Among them, the Filecoin system data structure is stored using DAG-CBOR (an IPLD codec) , which is used to store, retrieve, and traverse hash-linked data DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph, a graph theory data structure) . CBOR is a binary storage system . Filecoin uses CBOR to significantly improve efficiency. In addition, CBOR can handle more data types than JSON (a lightweight data exchange format) .

Another format associated with IPLD in Filecoin is CAR (Content Addressable aRchives, content addressable archives) , which can store content addressable objects in the form of IPLD block data as a byte sequence, with a general extension of .car . The purpose of this format is mainly to generate Filecoin shards by serializing IPLD DAG, which is the main representation of files in Filecoin, and then the .car file is further transformed to generate shard CIDs.

GraphSync is a request/response protocol that synchronizes parts of a graph (i.e., an authenticated DAG) between different peers , using selectors to identify specific subsets of the graph to be synchronized between different peers. Filecoin uses GraphSync to synchronize parts of the blockchain .

IPLD is just an updated iteration of data structure in the Web3 field. Before this, Web2 had many solutions in this regard, and there are many similarities with IPLD in the way of data structure processing, but IPLD has pioneered the field of decentralized storage, adding scalability and flexibility on the basis of the past, and providing developers with a way to promote