Latest News | Fleek stores and retrieves files on IPFS

Recently, Fleek officially announced that it will enable Filecoin automated archiving/backup for all outlets and storage on Fleek. This means that this will ensure that you have a redundant backup layer on the decentralized storage network outside of Fleek.

Fleek is an application mainly used for developing hosted websites, storing and delivering files, and serving the decentralized Web (DWeb). Its mission is to help everyone create web3.0 applications more easily and store files on distributed websites, thereby putting the DWeb at the forefront of "low-code/no-code" and accelerating the popularity and adoption of the DWeb.

It is worth noting that most of Fleek's products and services are built on the Fleek stack of IPFS, Textile and Filecoin, and the infrastructure is deployed through Fleek Edge, combining IPFS's distributed peer-to-peer data sharing protocol with edge computing to create an exceptionally fast and reliable distributed network solution. On Fleek Edge, data and information are processed and stored at the edge location geographically close to the user's request, reducing the waiting time for real-time data applications and improving the performance and speed of peer-to-peer interactions.

For the Fleek team, it is IPFS that makes the DWeb possible, and Fleek hopes to make IPFS easier, faster, and more streamlined.

Fleek’s hosting and storage products automatically handle IPFS-specific details by automatically updating references to content identifiers (CIDs), TXT values ​​in DNS records, and more. By creating a streamlined workflow to use, build, and deploy to IPFS, Fleek enables developers to integrate the key benefits of the protocol into their applications. In addition, the Fleek Edge network provides significant performance and efficiency improvements that can benefit everyone from DWeb newbies to IPFS veterans. In short, Fleek’s product portfolio provides a wide range of capabilities and builds a bridge between the traditional Web and the DWeb, facilitating many valuable use cases in both the end-user and developer space.

1. Fleek provides many frameworks, such as gatsby, jekyll, create-react-app, etc.

2. Fleek also handles DNS records. Buy a domain from them, or point it to a domain you bought elsewhere.

3. No need to manually update hash, TXT value, etc.

4. Fleek provides CID (content identifier) ​​to implement more IPFS features such as verification and self-hosting.

Fleek creates a streamlined workflow for anyone who wants to host, share, or build content on the decentralized web. Fleek provides its own public IPFS gateway, which means developers don't need to build their own services to serve their users. The gateway even allows older web browsers and applications that don't understand IPFS to access content served over IPFS. Fleek can also automate the build and deployment process on IPFS. Developers using Fleek for site and application deployment don't have to do anything, just link Fleek with their GitHub repository, and Fleek will automatically build and deploy their code over IPFS.

Filecoin is a distributed network designed to store the most important information of human society. Since the launch of its mainnet last year, it has achieved one milestone after another, and its decentralized storage capacity has continued to expand, creating unlimited possibilities for the future development of Web 3.0.

In the first V1, Filecoin will act as a secondary archival layer parallel to Fleek's main IPFS storage infrastructure. IPFS provides Fleek with a high-performance and distributed user-controlled storage layer, which is very suitable for daily high-performance content operations; while Filecoin's current state is designed to provide a strong and untrusted archival layer, which does an excellent job in ensuring the integrity, lifespan, and persistence of files and data.

Storage is one of the most centralized core aspects of the current Web infrastructure, and how to decentralize storage has always been a consideration for many service providers. Not only is storage controlled by a few online providers, but the actual files themselves are also stored in a centralized server infrastructure. If an error occurs, the entire network will be interrupted, such as the AWS outage in November last year, which caused huge losses.

Now, let's dive into how Filecoin archives behave in this first version. When you upload files on IPFS or host a node, Fleek will start packaging them up and preparing them for storage in Filecoin. These valid data (composed of multiple files, not just a single file) are then sent to Filecoin miners, who receive the data fragments, facilitate on-chain transactions, and begin the "wrapping" process for Filecoin.

Here, miners copy the resulting proof, a unique representation of the data and a copy sealed in a storage “sector” after encoding it into a new configuration to allow the next proof-of-stake process (PoS). Thereafter, miners must continually provide proof-of-spacetime, or proof of continuous storage of this information.

Therefore, files and data from Fleek will be archived in Filecoin! If you access your Fleek account and navigate to a file in your live node or storage, you will be able to see the corresponding transaction ID of the Filecoin transaction to confirm that it has been archived in the network. When your file has been finalized but not yet archived, you will see a pending status.

In V1, Fleek interacts with the Filecoin network on behalf of users to generate these data validations and ensure the feasibility of the process. We hope that the framework will also change like Filecoin, so that dynamic changes to each file during the archiving/retrieval process and direct interaction between users and the network are achieved.

These first real-time interactions between Fleek and the Filecoin network give us a dynamic view of the use of decentralized and open storage networks from a platform/application perspective. Since the official launch of the Filecoin mainnet in October 2020, more and more projects have emerged, and the distributed storage ecosystem has become more and more prosperous. At this stage, the entire industry is in a period of vigorous development, and we look forward to Fleek being able to provide more services to users in the future.

Related reading:

Decentralized Market

From Web2.0 to Web3.0

Dether——Building the world's cryptocurrency ecosystem for individuals and stores

Filecoin Spec Series (I)