Introducing the IPFS Foundation

Today's internet has become fragmented and fragile — when servers go down or platforms change ownership, content disappears forever.

These incidents reveal a uncomfortable truth: our internet, for all its apparent reach and power, is fundamentally fragile. Most of the content we depend on lives in just a handful of massive data centers owned by a few corporations. When those servers fail — whether due to technical problems, corporate decisions, natural disasters, or government censorship — information simply vanishes.

This fragility isn't just inconvenient; it's dangerous. Scientific research gets lost when universities can't maintain their servers. Historical records disappear when news organizations shut down their archives. Entire communities lose their digital gathering places when platforms change their policies or go out of business.

But what if the internet worked differently? What if content persisted even when individual servers failed? What if accessing information didn't depend on the goodwill of a few powerful intermediaries? What if the web itself was designed to —once again — be as distributed and resilient as the communities it serves?

A Different Kind of Internet is Possible — And It's Already Here

That different internet already exists — it's called IPFS, an open-source project started in 2014 by Protocol Labs. Over the past decade, hundreds of contributors have built the InterPlanetary File System into a robust ecosystem with dozens of software libraries and implementations. Today, IPFS consists of 3 focus areas: content-addressing tools and utilities that can be used in any software stack, a resilient public network (Amino), and libraries for running your own private networks.

IPFS has been used to organize and distribute many exabytes of data across the globe, with 250,000 public peer-to-peer nodes, and over 2.5 million daily users. It is used by technologists, archivists, activists, artists, governments, scientists, and many other technical communities, for solutions ranging from verifiable preservation of important historical archives to enabling communication in the face of censorship or low connectivity.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

Moving from "it works" to "it transforms the internet" requires coordination. That's why we're launching the IPFS Foundation — not to control or direct this thriving ecosystem, but to serve as connective tissue. We exist to help coordinate between the project, our dizzying range of users and contributors, and the broader web, and to ensure the protocol's long-term sustainability as it scales to serve billions of users.

Our primary avenue for this work is stewardship of the open-source IPFS Project and community.

• Building the protocol foundation. We collaborate with developers worldwide to design and refine IPFS protocols, ensuring they remain robust, efficient, ready for tomorrow's internet challenges.
• Making IPFS accessible. We maintain and support comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and specifications so developers can easily integrate IPFS components into their projects — from small apps to enterprise systems.
• Driving real-world adoption. We work directly with organizations to deploy IPFS-based solutions, demonstrating how content addressing creates faster, more resilient applications that users and actually want to use.
• Integrating with web standards. We sponsor multi-year efforts to embed IPFS-compatible technologies directly into browsers and internet infrastructure, working with global technical standards bodies such as W3C and IETF.
• Investing in long-term stewardship and breakthrough innovations. Through targeted grants and collaborations, we fund research and software development that equips IPFS for the challenges of today and tomorrow — from improving performance to enabling new use cases.

The internet's future depends on systems that put users first. Through research, design, writing, education, and collaboration with like-minded organizations, we are demonstrating that decentralized technologies can deliver better user experiences while preserving privacy, choice, and resilience.

Join Us

The centralized web wasn't inevitable—it was just one path we happened to take. But it's not too late to choose a different direction. Whether you're a developer curious about content addressing, an organization looking for more reliable and efficient infrastructure, or simply someone who believes the internet can be better, we invite you to join this effort. The future of human knowledge and connection depends on the choices we make today.

Learn more about our work and how to get involved on the IPFS website. Follow IPFS progress and technical updates on the project's Bluesky, X, email newsletter, and blog.