IPFS Strategic Blueprint 2025-2030: Web3 Infrastructure Evolution

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is undergoing a fundamental transformation that will define Web3 infrastructure for the next decade. The decentralized storage protocol is evolving from a file-sharing system into the foundational layer for verifiable, distributed computation—a shift projected to drive market growth from $9.1 billion in 2025 to $61.2 billion by 2034, representing a 23.5% compound annual growth rate.

What’s happening: IPFS, originally designed as a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol for decentralized file storage, is pivoting toward Compute-over-Data (CoD) and Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) as its primary value drivers. This evolution is powered by the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) and distributed compute frameworks like Bacalhau, which enable computation to move directly to where data resides rather than requiring massive data transfers.

Why it matters: This architectural shift addresses three critical limitations of centralized cloud infrastructure: data sovereignty concerns, prohibitive egress costs for large datasets, and censorship vulnerabilities. With over 614 million daily requests currently funneling through centralized public gateways—creating unsustainable bottlenecks and recentralization risks—the protocol’s 2025 transition to a “Post Gateway World” of verifiable, self-served retrieval represents a make-or-break inflection point.

When: The 2025-2030 strategic roadmap prioritizes verifiable retrieval tools launching in 2025, CoD infrastructure maturation by 2027, and enterprise DePIN adoption scaling through 2030.

This analysis examines IPFS’s protocol evolution, market dynamics, competitive positioning against permanent storage solutions like Arweave, and strategic recommendations for stakeholders navigating Web3’s infrastructure layer.

The IPFS Foundation: Content Addressing Meets Distributed Architecture

IPFS represents a fundamental rethinking of how content is addressed and distributed across the internet. Unlike traditional location-based addressing—where URLs point to specific servers that can move, fail, or be censored—IPFS uses content addressing. Files are identified by cryptographic hashes called Content Identifiers (CIDs) that guarantee data integrity and immutability.

Core Protocol Architecture

The IPFS protocol stack consists of several interconnected components working in concert:

Content Addressing (CID): Every piece of content receives a unique cryptographic hash. When you request a file, you ask the network “who has this hash?” rather than “what’s at this location?” This approach ensures that content cannot be tampered with—any modification changes the hash, making alterations immediately detectable.

Distributed Hash Table (DHT): IPFS uses a Kademlia-based DHT for routing, enabling peers to discover which nodes store specific content without relying on central directories. This decentralized discovery mechanism is critical for censorship resistance.

Bitswap Protocol: This is IPFS’s block exchange mechanism. Nodes trade data blocks they possess for blocks they need, creating a peer-to-peer marketplace of content that incentivizes participation and efficient distribution.

libp2p: A modular network stack providing peer-to-peer connectivity, transport encryption, and multiplexing. libp2p enables IPFS to work across diverse network environments—from browsers to data centers—with consistent behavior.

InterPlanetary Linked Data (IPLD): IPLD creates verifiable data graphs that link across different data structures and systems. This composability layer enables advanced applications like Ceramic’s decentralized identity networks to build complex, interconnected data relationships on IPFS.

Implementation Evolution

IPFS implementations have evolved to serve different use cases. Kubo (formerly go-ipfs) remains the reference implementation, optimized for server deployments and storage providers. Helia, the browser-first implementation, emphasizes modularity and JavaScript ecosystem integration, enabling developers to embed IPFS functionality directly into web applications without requiring separate infrastructure.

Explosive Market Growth: $9.1B to $61.2B by 2034

The decentralized storage market is experiencing structural tailwinds driven by four macro forces: escalating privacy concerns regarding centralized cloud providers, desire for true data ownership, cost efficiency for large-scale storage, and resilience against censorship and single points of failure.

Market Size and Regional Dynamics

The global decentralized cloud storage market is projected to surge from $9.1 billion in 2025 to $61.2 billion by 2034, representing a robust 23.5% compound annual growth rate. North America currently dominates with approximately 35.2% market share in 2024, driven by enterprise adoption of Web3 infrastructure and regulatory pressure for data sovereignty.

However, the geographic distribution of value is shifting. Emerging markets in Asia-Pacific and Latin America are experiencing faster growth rates as developers in these regions adopt decentralized infrastructure to bypass limitations of traditional cloud providers and reduce exposure to geopolitical data access restrictions.

Value Migration Up the Stack

A critical trend reshaping the IPFS ecosystem is value concentration moving up-stack. Raw storage and basic pinning services—the commodity layer—face compression as competition intensifies. Instead, economic value is accumulating in programmable layers: the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) for smart contract orchestration, Compute-over-Data frameworks, and specialized DePIN applications.

This mirrors the evolution of traditional cloud computing, where infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) margins compressed while platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) captured outsized returns. IPFS developers and storage providers positioning at higher abstraction layers will capture disproportionate value creation through 2030.

Economic Ecosystem: Pinning and Gateway Services

Two foundational service segments underpin the IPFS economy:

Service Category	2031 Projected Market	CAGR	Core Function	Strategic Risk
Pinning Services	$174 million	10.3%	Guarantee CID persistence	Centralization of persistence responsibility
Gateway Services	$179 million	11.5%	Web2↔Web3 HTTP bridge	Recentralization bottleneck, latency issues

Pinning services provide persistence guarantees for content identified by CIDs. In IPFS’s architecture, content remains available only as long as at least one node “pins” it—explicitly storing and serving the data. Without pinning, content can be garbage collected and disappear from the network. Commercial pinning services like Pinata, Web3.Storage, and NFT.Storage emerged to provide reliable, professionally managed persistence for applications unwilling to operate their own infrastructure.

Gateway services function as HTTP bridges, translating traditional web requests into IPFS retrievals. Public gateways like ipfs.io and dweb.link enable standard browsers to access IPFS content without installing specialized software. However, this convenience created dangerous centralization—as detailed in the following section, these gateways now handle over 614 million requests daily, creating unsustainable bottlenecks that threaten the protocol’s decentralization thesis.

The 2025 Inflection: Escaping the Gateway Trap

The IPFS protocol faces an existential challenge in 2025: its success created centralization risks that threaten its core value proposition. Public gateways—the HTTP bridges enabling traditional browsers to access IPFS content—have become critical bottlenecks processing over 614 million requests daily.

The Gateway Centralization Problem

Public gateways like ipfs.io and dweb.link were designed as temporary bridges to ease IPFS adoption. Instead, they became permanent infrastructure supporting production applications. The performance and centralization costs are severe:

Latency penalty: Public gateways average ~540 milliseconds retrieval time compared to ~150 milliseconds for private, self-hosted gateways. This 3.6x performance gap makes IPFS feel sluggish compared to centralized alternatives, undermining adoption.

Traffic concentration: Analysis reveals that 67% of gateway traffic originates from backend clients—developers treating public gateways as free content delivery networks (CDNs) for production applications. This unsustainable usage pattern creates financial strain on gateway operators and reconsolidates traffic through a handful of chokepoints, directly contradicting IPFS’s decentralization goals.

Censorship vulnerability: Centralized gateways become obvious targets for censorship, legal pressure, and technical attacks. If a few major gateways block or filter content, the practical accessibility of that content collapses for most users despite theoretically remaining available on the distributed network.

The “Post Gateway World” initiative, launched by IP Shipyard in 2025, represents IPFS’s strategic pivot to address these vulnerabilities by transitioning to verifiable, self-served retrieval patterns.

Verifiable Retrieval: Three Paths Forward

IPFS developers are deploying three complementary approaches to eliminate gateway dependency:

1. Verified Fetch (@helia/verified-fetch)

This library provides a drop-in replacement for JavaScript’s standard fetch() API with cryptographic verification built in. Applications retrieve content directly from IPFS peers, verify the content hash locally, and receive the same security guarantees as centralized gateways—but without routing traffic through third-party infrastructure. This approach is ideal for Node.js applications, serverless functions, and backend services that previously relied on public gateways.

2. Service Worker Gateway (inbrowser.link)

Service Workers enable sophisticated request interception and modification within web browsers. The inbrowser.link implementation embeds a lightweight IPFS gateway directly into the user’s browser as a Service Worker. This architecture enables:

Offline-first applications: Static dApps (decentralized applications) can function completely offline once initially loaded, with the Service Worker retrieving content from local cache or peer discovery.
Zero-server deployment: Developers can distribute applications entirely via IPFS without maintaining any HTTP server infrastructure.
User sovereignty: Each user’s browser independently verifies and caches content, eliminating gateway intermediaries.

3. Self-Hosting Solutions (Rainbow, Someguy)

For organizations requiring HTTP compatibility but wanting private control, self-hosted gateway solutions like Rainbow and Someguy provide turnkey packages. These gateways integrate delegated routing—discovering content locations from the DHT without storing it—and can be deployed within corporate networks, providing IPFS access while maintaining compliance and performance requirements.

Beyond gateway transition, IPFS core development focuses on efficiency and developer experience:

Space-efficient encoding: Erasure coding techniques enable data reconstruction from partial information, reducing storage redundancy requirements while maintaining fault tolerance. This advancement is critical for cost-effective long-term archival on Filecoin storage providers.

Content Addressable aRchives (CAR) utilities: CAR format bundles related IPFS data into single files, improving transfer efficiency and enabling more sophisticated data management. Spring 2025 grants prioritize CAR explorers, analysis tools, and utilities that make working with large datasets more tractable.

Helia developer experience: As the browser-first implementation, Helia requires specialized tooling, documentation, and examples that address web developers’ specific challenges—from bundle size optimization to Progressive Web App (PWA) integration patterns.

Compute-over-Data: The $61B Opportunity

The most transformative evolution in IPFS’s roadmap is the shift from decentralized storage to Compute-over-Data (CoD)—a paradigm where computation moves to where data resides rather than transferring massive datasets to centralized compute clusters. This architectural inversion addresses three critical pain points simultaneously: prohibitive egress costs, data sovereignty requirements, and verification trust.

Why Compute-over-Data Matters

Traditional cloud computing workflows require moving data to compute resources. For large datasets—genomics research, climate modeling, machine learning training sets—this data movement incurs massive costs. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure charge substantial egress fees (typically $0.09-$0.12 per GB) to move data out of their ecosystems, creating lock-in through economic friction.

Compute-over-Data inverts this model. Instead of moving petabytes of data to centralized processors, lightweight compute jobs travel to distributed storage providers who already possess the data. This approach:

Reduces costs: Eliminates egress fees and reduces network bandwidth requirements by orders of magnitude. Only computation results—typically tiny compared to input datasets—need to traverse the network.

Preserves sovereignty: Data owners maintain custody of sensitive information while enabling third parties to perform computations. Healthcare providers can enable research on patient data without exposing personally identifiable information. Governments can share economic datasets for analysis while retaining territorial control.

Leverages existing infrastructure: Filecoin storage providers already maintain substantial compute capabilities to manage their storage operations. CoD monetizes this existing hardware without requiring separate data center buildouts.

Bacalhau: Distributed Compute Infrastructure

Bacalhau operates as the public, verifiable distributed compute layer for IPFS and Filecoin networks. The architecture enables developers to submit compute jobs—packaged as Docker containers or WebAssembly modules—that execute across storage provider infrastructure.

Key architectural features include:

Pluggable storage backends: Jobs can operate on data stored in IPFS, Filecoin, local filesystems, or S3-compatible storage, providing flexibility for heterogeneous data sources.

Multiple compute engines: Support for both Docker (maximum compatibility with existing tools and libraries) and WebAssembly (lightweight, secure sandbox execution) enables developers to choose appropriate isolation and performance trade-offs.

Verifiable computation: Cryptographic proofs enable verification that computations executed correctly without requiring trust in individual storage providers. This verification layer is critical for commercial and research applications where result integrity is paramount.

Bacalhau’s roadmap through 2027 focuses on enhanced orchestration capabilities, improved proof systems, and integration with decentralized AI/ML workflows.

Filecoin Virtual Machine: Programmable Storage

The Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) adds smart contract programmability directly to Filecoin’s storage network. FVM enables:

Automated storage deal orchestration: Smart contracts can programmatically create, renew, and manage storage deals based on predefined conditions—enabling applications to ensure data permanence without manual intervention.

Compute-over-Data job coordination: FVM contracts coordinate with Bacalhau to schedule compute jobs, manage payment flows, and verify computation results, creating end-to-end programmable data pipelines.

Novel financial primitives: Storage providers can tokenize their capacity, create derivatives on storage pricing, and participate in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols—unlocking liquidity for capital-intensive infrastructure investments.

Data DAOs: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations can collectively own, govern, and monetize shared datasets, with FVM smart contracts managing access permissions, revenue distribution, and curation incentives.

The combination of Bacalhau’s compute fabric and FVM’s programmability creates a composable infrastructure stack enabling applications impossible in centralized cloud environments.

IPFS for Decentralized AI: Censorship-Resistant Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence training and deployment increasingly confront censorship pressures, centralized control of training datasets, and restrictions on model distribution. IPFS provides critical infrastructure enabling censorship-resistant, collaborative AI development.

Dataset Storage and Provenance

Machine learning training datasets often exceed terabytes in size. Storing these datasets on IPFS ensures immutability—researchers can cryptographically verify they’re working with identical data, preventing dataset poisoning attacks and ensuring reproducibility. IPFS’s content addressing creates permanent, citable references for training data, addressing the scientific reproducibility crisis in AI research.

Major AI research collaborations are beginning to publish datasets to IPFS as the canonical distribution mechanism, with cryptographic hashes serving as dataset identifiers in academic publications. This practice ensures long-term availability independent of institutional hosting decisions or funding availability.

Model Artifact Distribution

Trained model weights and inference engines—often gigabytes in size—distribute efficiently across IPFS’s peer-to-peer network. Developers in regions with restricted access to centralized AI platforms can retrieve state-of-the-art models via IPFS, bypassing geographic restrictions and API rate limits.

Future: Decentralized Training and Inference

The 2027-2030 roadmap envisions fully decentralized training orchestration—coordinating gradient computations across geographically distributed Compute-over-Data nodes and aggregating updates via IPFS. This approach enables:

Federated learning patterns where sensitive training data never leaves local storage providers
Censorship-resistant model development immune to centralized platform policy changes
Monetization of idle GPU capacity through Filecoin’s economic mechanisms

Early proof-of-concepts demonstrate feasibility. Production-scale deployment awaits improvements in inter-node communication efficiency and proof-of-training verification systems.

DePIN Revolution: Physical Infrastructure Meets Decentralized Networks

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) represent a new asset class where blockchain-based token incentives coordinate deployment and operation of physical infrastructure—from wireless networks to energy grids to storage capacity.

Filecoin exemplifies DePIN applied to storage: the FIL token incentivizes storage providers globally to deploy disk capacity and reliably store client data. This coordination mechanism aligned independent economic actors to create the world’s largest decentralized storage network without centralized capital deployment.

Edge Computing Integration

IPFS’s peer-to-peer architecture naturally complements edge computing patterns. Rather than routing data through distant data centers, edge deployments can:

Maintain locality: Healthcare imaging, autonomous vehicle sensor data, and IoT telemetry can be stored and processed at network edges, reducing latency from hundreds of milliseconds to single-digit milliseconds critical for real-time applications.

Tolerate intermittency: Edge nodes frequently experience unreliable connectivity. IPFS’s content addressing ensures data integrity regardless of which specific nodes serve content, and automatic replication ensures availability despite individual node failures.

Healthcare Use Case: Secure Medical Imaging

The eHealth vertical illustrates DePIN and IPFS synergy. Medical imaging generates massive datasets requiring:

Patient privacy: HIPAA and GDPR compliance demands data sovereignty
Long-term retention: Regulatory requirements mandate multi-decade archival
Emergency access: Critical health data must be retrievable with low latency
Tamper evidence: Diagnostic images require cryptographic integrity guarantees

IPFS-based medical imaging systems store encrypted image data across geographically distributed storage providers, with access controlled via FVM smart contracts. Content addressing provides cryptographic proof that images remain unaltered since capture. Emergency access leverages local edge nodes for sub-second retrieval while maintaining global redundancy for resilience.

Several pilot deployments in the EU and Asia-Pacific are demonstrating technical feasibility in 2025, with broader clinical adoption projected for 2027-2028 pending regulatory framework maturation.

IPFS serves as infrastructure for core Web3 primitives that require censorship-resistant, verifiable data storage independent of centralized platforms.

Decentralized Identity (DID) and Verifiable Credentials

Self-sovereign identity systems enable individuals to control their digital identities without reliance on centralized identity providers like Facebook, Google, or government databases. IPFS plays a critical role in these systems:

ION (Identity Overlay Network), developed by Microsoft and built on Bitcoin’s blockchain, uses IPFS for anchoring identity state. When users create or update their decentralized identifiers, the state data is stored on IPFS, with only the content hash anchored to Bitcoin. This architecture provides the security and immutability of Bitcoin while enabling the storage scalability of IPFS—Bitcoin’s limited block space stores compact references, while IPFS handles the full identity documents.

Ceramic Network and ComposeDB build scalable, composable identity and social data infrastructure directly on IPLD (InterPlanetary Linked Data) and libp2p—the same core technologies powering IPFS. Ceramic enables developers to create interoperable data models for user profiles, social graphs, and application state that persist across applications and platforms. A user’s social connections, reputation scores, and preferences become portable assets they control, rather than platform-specific data locked in proprietary databases.

This composability enables “log in with your decentralized identity” patterns where users authenticate once and carry their data, reputation, and social graph across the entire Web3 ecosystem—the antithesis of siloed Web2 platforms.

NFTs and Metaverse Asset Permanence

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) fundamentally rely on the permanence of their associated media and metadata. Early NFT implementations stored only token ownership on-chain, with actual media hosted on centralized servers—creating the absurd situation where $millions in NFT value reference assets that could disappear if a startup fails or a cloud bill goes unpaid.

IPFS has become the de facto standard for NFT media storage. Major marketplaces including OpenSea, Rarible, and Foundation encourage or require IPFS URIs (ipfs:// protocol) for asset references. This ensures:

Content integrity: The hash-based addressing means the NFT reference cryptographically binds to specific content that cannot be altered
Censorship resistance: No single entity can remove or modify the asset
Permanence guarantees: Services like NFT.Storage provide free, perpetual pinning backed by Filecoin storage deals, ensuring long-term availability

Beyond static NFTs, metaverse platforms are adopting IPFS for 3D assets, textures, game logic, and virtual world state. Decentralized gaming platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox store land parcel data, wearables, and user-generated content on IPFS, enabling true digital property ownership independent of game developer solvency.

The hybrid architecture—on-chain social graph with IPFS media storage—has emerged as the practical design pattern for decentralized social (DeSo) platforms. Examples include Lens Protocol, Farcaster, and platforms building on Ceramic.

This separation balances competing requirements:

Social graphs (who follows whom, likes, reposts) benefit from blockchain immutability and queryability but generate high transaction volumes
Media content (images, videos, long-form posts) requires bulk storage impractical for on-chain data but benefits from IPFS’s content addressing and peer-to-peer distribution

The architecture enables platform-independent social graphs where users own their followers and content, capable of switching front-end clients while maintaining their social presence—analogous to email’s portability across clients despite protocol standardization.

Archival and censorship resistance represents another critical use case. Organizations archive censored content, leaked documents, and threatened knowledge bases to IPFS. The Internet Archive has mirrored vulnerable Wikipedia instances to IPFS, and election integrity groups store official election data to create tamper-evident records immune to post-election revision attempts.

VI. Challenges, Competition, and Mitigation

6.1 Performance & Scale

Public latency ~540ms; need private gateways, caching, delegated routing.
Large‑file uploads, sharding, incentivized caching.
Availability vs persistence: pinning required; unpinned data can be GC’d.

6.2 Adoption

Complexity (wallets, tokens). Solutions: fiat onramps (e.g., DeStor), higher‑level SDKs, verified‑fetch.
Interop & governance: standards, privacy/DRM compliance.

6.3 IPFS vs Permaweb (Arweave)

IPFS/Filecoin: conditional permanence (pinning), flexible cost, dynamic apps, CoD fit.
Arweave: upfront cost for long‑term permanence, simpler archival. Consider hybrid strategies.

VII. Conclusion & Recommendations

2030 Outlook: IPFS as dominant content‑addressing standard; success measured by verifiable compute volume on IPFS‑stored data.
Invest in CoD stack (Bacalhau/FVM). Migrate heavy users off public gateways. Balance storage strategies (Arweave for immutable archives). Abstract complexity with payments & DX libraries.

Works Cited

Docs & Official Resources

IPFS Concepts — How IPFS works: https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/how-ipfs-works/
Programming on Filecoin: https://docs.filecoin.io/basics/what-is-filecoin/programming-on-filecoin
Filecoin Roadmap: https://docs.filecoin.io/smart-contracts/fundamentals/roadmap
Protocol Labs — Work: https://www.protocol.ai/work/
ipfs/kubo (Go implementation) — GitHub: https://github.com/ipfs/kubo
IPFS Implementation Fund — Grants: http://ipfsgrants.io/
Ceramic mainnet launch on IPFS/Filecoin: https://blog.ipfs.tech/2021-07-13-ceramic-mainnet-launch/
NFT.Storage — Hello World: https://blog.nft.storage/posts/2021-11-30-hello-world-nft-storage
A Post Gateway World — IP Shipyard: https://ipshipyard.com/blog/2025-a-post-gateway-world/
Bacalhau: Distributed Compute Over Data: https://bacalhau.org/
Bacalhau Architecture: https://bacalhau.org/docs/overview/architecture

Research

Efficient Data Management for IPFS-based Apps — arXiv: https://arxiv.org/html/2404.16210v1
DePIN Challenges & Opportunities — arXiv: https://arxiv.org/html/2406.02239v1
IoT Edge Challenges — IETF: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-t2trg-iot-edge-09.html
Zero-Trust Medical Image Sharing — MDPI: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/17/4/551
Libraries, Integrations and Hubs for Decentralized AI using IPFS — arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16651

Market & Adoption

Decentralized Cloud Storage Market (Market.US): https://scoop.market.us/decentralized-cloud-storage-market-news/
Decentralized Storage Market Size 2025–2034 — GMI: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/decentralized-storage-market
IPFS Gateway Market 2025–2031 — Valuates Reports: https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/QYRE-Auto-39Y18911/global-ipfs-gateway
IPFS Pinning Market 2025–2031 — Valuates Reports: https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/QYRE-Auto-13E19157/global-ipfs-interplanetary-file-system-pinning
IPFS Services Market 2033 — Dataintelo: https://dataintelo.com/report/ipfs-services-market
IPFS vs Arweave 2025 — Tantrija: https://www.tantrija.com/blog/decentralized-storage-2025
Bankless — NFT Storage (IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave): https://www.bankless.com/nft-storage

Ecosystem & Commentary

IPFS Explained — AR Data Technologies: https://medium.com/@ardata.tech/ipfs-explained-the-backbone-of-decentralized-web3-storage-f6243aeeb0a2
Blockchain IPFS — Rapid Innovation: https://www.rapidinnovation.io/post/blockchain-ipfs-comprehensive-guide-to-decentralized-storage-solutions
IPFS on Kaleido: https://www.kaleido.io/blockchain-platform/ipfs-file-store
DePIN Overview — Rapid Innovation: https://www.rapidinnovation.io/post/depin-the-ultimate-guide-to-decentralized-physical-infrastructure-networks
Pinata — How Gaming Benefits from IPFS: https://pinata.cloud/blog/how-gaming-benefits-from-ipfs/
Arweave vs. IPFS — The Blog Chain: https://medium.com/the-blog-chain/arweave-vs-ipfs-what-is-the-future-of-decentralized-storage-b476aad02320
Filecoin Virtual Machine Explained: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/the-filecoin-virtual-machine-explained/