The IPFS Network from the Hydras' Point of View
Dennis Trautwein
About this talk
This short demo presents measurement results from analyzing the Hydra boosters' view of the IPFS network using their DynamoDB store of provider and peer records. Dennis verifies that Hydra heads are uniformly distributed across the hash space and appear within the 20 closest peers for over 97% of nodes found by the Nebula crawler, then uses the joined provider and peer records to map CIDs to geographic locations, showing that more than 50% of CIDs originate from the United States, followed by the Netherlands and France. The data reveals roughly 1 billion unique CIDs per day with about 50% daily churn, equivalent to around 120 terabytes of content rotating in and out of the network. He also highlights provider concentration, with a single peer providing 13% of all CIDs, and introduces Antares, a tool that publishes random content and queries it through gateways and pinning services to identify which peer IDs correspond to which operators. The talk closes by previewing follow-up experiments that exclude Hydras from content retrieval and publication to quantify their actual performance impact.