Cloudflare Hands Public IPFS Gateway Traffic to Interplanetary Shipyard

IPFS, the content-addressed distributed file system first released in 2015, has counted Cloudflare among its operators since 2018, when the company launched its public IPFS gateway. Cloudflare now plans to shift that gateway traffic to infrastructure run by the IPFS Foundation and maintained by the Interplanetary Shipyard engineering collective.

The move follows the April 2024 restructuring in which core IPFS developers and maintainers moved from Protocol Labs—where IPFS was created and incubated—to Shipyard, an independent entity. Cloudflare characterizes the transition as an "exit to community" that strengthens community ownership and management of IPFS and related protocols. The company says it fully supports Shipyard's continued infrastructure work for the open web.

Transition Timeline and Impact

Starting May 14, 2024, traffic hitting Cloudflare's public IPFS gateway will be progressively redirected to the IPFS Foundation's gateways at ipfs.io or dweb.link. Cloudflare's public gateway is only one of many in the ecosystem, which also includes Pinata, eth.limo, and others; users can consult the IPFS Public Gateway Checker for the full list of available options.

Requests addressed to cloudflare-ipfs.com and cf-ipfs.com will continue to work and be forwarded to the new gateways until August 14, 2024. After that date, those hostnames will no longer resolve to IPFS content, and users must switch their gateway hostname to either ipfs.io or dweb.link to avoid outages. Cloudflare stresses that there is no change in the type or amount of end-user information visible to Cloudflare, the IPFS Foundation, or Shipyard throughout the transition.

Cloudflare frames the gateway handover as a way to boost ecosystem collaboration and protocol resiliency while ensuring healthy governance. The company will continue sponsoring Shipyard's work as gateway stewards.

Who Runs Shipyard

Interplanetary Shipyard is an engineering collective focused on user agency through technical work on IPFS and libp2p. Its engineers are core maintainers of key open-source implementations including Kubo, Rainbow, Boxo, Helia, and both go-libp2p and js-libp2p. The group also supports Probelab, a performance measurement tool. Shipyard engineers work alongside web2 and web3 teams to drive adoption and practical applications of the decentralized stack.