A Gateway Into the Distributed Web

Web3 technologies — distributed ledgers, NFTs, and the metaverse concepts built on them — have spent years maturing in relative obscurity. For most developers, the barrier to entry is steep: running distributed nodes, configuring unfamiliar toolchains, and tracking fast-moving chains just to get a basic application working. Cloudflare is opening a private beta for its Ethereum and IPFS gateways, aiming to remove that friction.

In the Web3 model, Ethereum functions as the compute layer while IPFS serves as the storage layer. Ethereum provides verifiable, decentralized computation via "smart contracts" — publicly available binaries that operate on an immutable blockchain state maintained by every node on the network. Because that state must be replicated everywhere, expensive operations are kept off-chain. IPFS fills the gap as a peer-to-peer distributed file system where content is addressed by hash, making it trivial to reference from a blockchain context.

From Distributed Systems to the Metaverse

The resurgence of the metaverse concept — popularized by novels like Snow Crash and Ready Player One — maps neatly onto this infrastructure. In that vision, users carry their digital goods across platforms. NFTs stored on IPFS and verified through Ethereum make ownership portable: creators can sell work without granting platforms a worldwide license, and buyers can use those assets in any compatible game or service. Content lives in open, decentralized ecosystems rather than walled gardens.

That shift carries different trust assumptions than the current web. Rather than relying on a single company because it happens to hold your data, trust is established through sources verifiable by all participants — whether that's safety numbers in messaging apps, X.509 certificates in public Certificate Transparency logs, or public keys interacting with blockchains.

Cloudflare positions itself as infrastructure for this emerging ecosystem rather than a gatekeeper. The company has been asked repeatedly by customers to support Web3 exploration and production offerings, and sees its role as providing the underlying platform — compute, storage, and networking — for decentralized applications. The belief is that a complete metaverse could be built on Cloudflare today using Ethereum, IPFS, RTC, R2 storage, and Workers.

What Gateways Actually Do

A gateway translates traffic between protocols so clients can reach systems that speak different languages. API gateways are the familiar example — they accept inbound API calls and route them to the appropriate services, which is how streaming platforms handle requests from hundreds of device types.

Web3 gateways solve the same basic problem for distributed systems. The distributed web hosts content and applications without servers, using consensus protocols and peer-to-peer networking. But browsers still speak HTTP. Gateways translate those HTTP requests into the correct Web3 protocol calls, letting users access distributed applications without running nodes or installing plugins.

Cloudflare's Ethereum and IPFS gateways take that translation step and add the operational layer the distributed web has lacked. Traditional web technologies have decades of standards and best practices around speed, security, and availability; distributed systems have focused more on redundancy. Running a gateway on Cloudflare's network means DNS, firewall, load balancing, rate limiting, and tunnels can all be managed from one console — for both a marketing site and the distributed application behind it.

The Problem With Existing Gateways

Today's Web3 gateway options have a scale problem. With too few gateways handling growing traffic across Ethereum and IPFS networks, an outage can cause pre-processed transactions to fall behind the blockchain they're accessing, increasing latency and potentially causing transactions to fail. For Dapp developers using IPFS to serve their front end, a gateway outage can take the entire application down. That means lost revenue and broken user trust.

Cloudflare's differentiator is its global network. Content fetched through its IPFS gateway can be cached near users, bringing download latency down to milliseconds compared with up to seconds per asset over native IPFS. That makes hybrid deployments viable: content served over source decentralized protocols while browsers and tools mature, with a gateway like Cloudflare handling the HTTP side for regular web users.

On the Ethereum side, the gateway addresses the two-sided nature of the ecosystem. Smart contracts run autonomously on the chain and don't need a network connection or user interface, which is why decentralized exchanges can operate continuously across multiple interfaces. Users, however, need to know the state of the chain and interact with it — historically by running their own node or using remote nodes via a standardized JSON RPC API. Cloudflare's Ethereum gateway provides that interface, letting application developers build front-facing apps that interact with NFT contracts, DeFi exchanges, and name services like ENS.

Early Traction and Availability

The gateways have already seen substantial use in alpha testing with early customers. More than 2,000 customers are using the IPFS gateway, moving over 275TB of traffic per month. For Ethereum, over 200 customers are transacting more than 13TB per month, including 1.6 billion requests. Those numbers include companies that have raised billions in venture capital, organizations powering decentralized finance on Ethereum, and emerging metaverses using NFT technology.

The private beta for both the Ethereum and IPFS gateways is now open for sign-up.