Internet hosting provider Cloudflare has unveiled a direct gateway to support the distributed web. Now, Cloudflare will be able to connect to domains hosted on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) by a new indexing service.
A new resolver for the distributed web
ENS has been working with Cloudflare since February 2020 on the project.
The company announced the new service on a blog post that was written by Thibault Meunier, saying,
“At Cloudflare Research, we have been exploring alternative ways to resolve queries to responses that align with these attributes. We are proud to announce a new resolver for the Distributed Web, where IPFS content indexed by the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) can be accessed.”
Meunier gave the details about the system such as IPFS and its addressing system, Ethereum and decentralized applications, how to access IPFS content, and more.
Cloudflare distributed web resolver is developed to be able to use the new way of indexing IPFS content directly from users’ web browsers. According to the blog post, accessing the ENS registry requires access to the Ethereum state. Therefore, to get access to IPFS, users would also need to access the IPFS network.
Cloudflare tackles this problem by using Cloudflare’s Distributed Web Gateway. Cloudflare operates both an Ethereum Gateway and an IPFS Gateway, respectively available at cloudflare-eth.com and cloudflare-ipfs.com.