Building an Ethereum and IPFS-based Decentralized Social Network System

Evolvement of blockchain technology has greatly changed the network and it makes many applications to be distributed, decentralized without loss of security. Ethereum is an open-source blockchain platform that provides a runtime environment for running smart contracts, which is called Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Ethereum-based applications are usually referred to as Decentralized Applications (DApps), since they are based on the decentralized EVM, and its smart contracts. Meanwhile, distributed data store also evolves fast with the blockchain technology. Distributed storage develops to reduce the cost of the server side hardware and increase data availability. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol for distributed storage. IPFS stores immutable data, remove duplication, and obtain address information for storage nodes to search for files in the network. Many DApps have been created with the use of these technologies and one example is to use this design for a decentralized Twitter-like system that is resistant to censorship and single point of failure. This paper involves researching the blockchain technology and implementing a decentralised social network application on the Ethereum private blockchain with the use of smart contract and IPFS. In addition, it examines how blockchain and distributed storage can enable more functionalities of traditional social network systems.