DXdao is taking a holistic approach when it comes to decentralization. Perfection is unattainable but tends to serve as a motivation rather than a deterrent. Next in our pursuit of achieving optimal efficiency and security is exploring an alternative decentralized file sharing and content distribution protocol.
DXdao hosts its landing page and the frontends to all of the dApps it develops and governs on ENS domains. It goes without saying that ENS can be pointed to a Skylink, otherwise we wouldn’t consider it. Browsers ask Cloudflare to read the state of an ENS domain, in order to resolve where it points and then forward that. However, as the eth.link resolver is owned and operated by Cloudflare, the issues that often arise and users experience come mostly from Cloudflare’s resolver rather than IPFS. So, hosting on Skynet won’t help in that regard. Nonetheless, it has its advantages, as CloudFlare also acts as the IPFS gateway, and if that gateway happens to be the problem, then Skynet would bypass that issue as its gateway is siasky.net.
Something else, with IPFS a pinning service is a must for data availability if Cloudflare is not caching files. Filecoin isn’t really cold storage, it’s not a ready-to-go solution and is intended to be used with another layer that combines Filecoin and IPFS, usually some platform as a service like Fleek. Filecoin hosts do not participate in the public IPFS network, so persisting files to Filecoin does not guarantee a user will be able to access data with only its CID. Skynet’s approach has storage and availability integrated and its infrastructure bypasses IPFS’s data availability problems, since data is stored on decentralized and incentivized hosts. The siasky gateway does not host the data, but pays hosts in Siacoin on behalf of the user. If a file’s health goes too low, Skynet pays additional hosts to bring the file up to full health. So, even if the portal is taken down, data availability wouldn’t be at risk. Most skyfiles are stored at 10x redundancy, which means 90% of their hosts can drop off the network and a file will still be accessible.
Lastly, Skynet’s Homescreen allows developers to easily deploy front-ends to decentralized storage, which is particularly useful for front-ends of DeFi and Web3 dApps, which prioritize security a censorship resistance, and need consistent access to the decentralized protocols and smart contracts. A DAO can deploy a site anonymously and straight from a github action, without any business relationship with skynet labs. Skynet handles the decentralized storage and Homescreen provides access and versioning. Updates are made available for apps by using resolver skylinks. If a project updates where a resolver skylink resolves to, users will be able save the new underlying skylink as a “version” of the app. This skylink is also used for grouping saved versions and checking for updates. If no skylink field is found, the resolver skylink used when initially adding the app to Homescreen will be used. If the app has no resolver skylink associated with it, updates and versions are not available for the file or application.
Twitter
Getting Started
Homescreen
Moving from IPFS to Skynet