Studying the Workload of a Fully Decentralized Web3 System: IPFS

In this paper we present a study of the workload of the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized file system which is a key enabler of Web3. Our study focuses on the access patterns observed from one of the most popular IPFS gateways located in North America, and analyzes these access patterns in light of one of the most common assumptions made in regard to the access pattern of decentralized content sharing systems: that the access patterns are mostly geographically localized. However, through our study, we show that the access patterns are content-dependent rather than geographically localized. In our study, we found that access patterns mostly target a small set of popular content, which is provided by nodes in the North American and European regions, despite the location of the requester. Furthermore, we found that, interestingly, this popular content is only provided by a few nodes in the system, suggesting a significant imbalance both in content providers and in the access patterns of the system to the content. This in turn suggests that the system is significantly centralized on these few node providers.