Some of the geeks among you might have already noticed our guide on setting up an IPFS gateway was posted on our community technology forum a few days ago.

The NKN team has been in contact with the IPFS team since the very beginning of our project. Both teams do share a lot of common aspirations and thoughts as the key web 3.0 infrastructure protocols, surely not just in our web 3.0 talks every year but also on an ongoing development basis.

Setting up one’s own IPFS gateway on the NKN network is something people have shown lots of interest in since our core developer mentioned his idea in our community Discord group (you’re more than welcome to join NKN discord group here).

And with more questions flooding our community since the short tutorial, we reckon it is a good time to dig a bit deeper into why and how’s under the scene.

With that being said, let’s welcome our core developer Moore for these 8 interesting questions.

1.   A little introduction of yourself and your work might be very helpful for our audiences, please.

Hi, I am Moore from NKN. A software engineer for twenty years, I had taken part in the P2P network, consensus, and APM (Application Performance Management) of NKN mainnet, and now working on NKN C++ SDK. Before joining the crypto world, I worked for 16 years at companies such as IBM, Nokia Siemens, Polycom, and Baidu, working in areas such as ecosystem, carrier-class network and distributed computation. These experiences have helped me a lot in the NKN project.

2.   How did the idea of incorporating IPFS within the NKN network come to you?

As you know, NKN provides decentralized network transmission to the web 3.0 world. But in many application scenarios, users also have storage requirements. Such as the NKN’s nMobile chat app, we need a temporary storage space in order to cache offline messages when the recipient is not online. When these messages are large in size (such as image/video/voice), it is not economical to cache them in NKN miner nodes. Then, we noticed that famous project in decentralized and distributed storage — IPFS.

3.   What can the IPFS gateway do in the NKN network?

Our IPFS gateway makes it possible for NKN network users to access and view data hosted by themselves on the IPFS network. Users can upload their contents onto the IPFS network via the gateway for free.

4.   Why would you recommend IPFS instead of others that might also be used as a decentralized storage protocol?

When we were looking for a decentralized storage infrastructure for nMobile, we evaluated several candidates, such as Storj, Chia, Arweave etc. Finally, after comprehensively weighing various factors such as project maturity, community popularity and development activity, IPFS was selected.

5.   From the perspective of an experienced engineer, do you think migrations/collaborations between two or more projects are important? If so, why would it be?

Yes. It is very important. A project often focuses on solving a certain aspect of the problem, and a complete business solution needs to integrate more than one project to meet requirements from business use cases. This is the difference between a project and a business.

6.   How do we set up our own IPFS gateway on the NKN network? And is it doable for amateurs or dummies?

I posted a tutorial about setting up your own IPFS gateway step by step in the NKN official forum. Anyone including newbies can also set up his own IPFS gateway by himself.

7.   Anything fun or inspirations you’ve come up with upon deploying IPFS for the NKN network?

When adding connectivity to storage, we can do many interesting things. Such as Instagram, BitTorrent or any UGC platform on the NKN network. Users can generate, save his content on a decentralized network and share it to others. Another case is metaverse. In short, anything is possible.

8.   As the NKN network has so much potential to expand and migrate with different kinds of industry’s top-tier web 3.0 projects just as IPFS, do your engineering team have other things in mind for us in the near future?

Sure. We have a technology roadmap for NKN, such as EVM, smart contract, IPv6 etc. Please subscribe to our official channels for the latest announcement.