Decentralized Storage with IPFS: How Does It Work Under the Hood?
Dennis Trautwein
About this talk
A code.talks 2022 introduction to IPFS that walks through how the protocol actually operates beneath the user-facing commands. Trautwein covers content addressing and CIDs, how files are chunked and assembled into Merkle DAGs via IPLD, and how the Kademlia DHT distributes provider records across the network using XOR distance and bucketed routing tables. He explains the full content publishing and retrieval flow, including bootstrapping, routing-table construction, and why provider records are replicated across the 20 closest peers. The talk closes with results from his Nebula-based measurement campaign, including network crawls every 30 minutes, peer churn analysis showing ~50% of nodes leave within an hour, and findings that roughly 97% of IPFS nodes are not hosted on centralized cloud providers.