(2024-02-28) Fission Ipfs Mainnet And The Everywhere Computer

Fission: IPFS, Mainnet and the Everywhere Computer. Content addressing is a fundamentally useful innovation that opens new use cases and approaches that are difficult or impossible without.

This year, the community and the organizations involved are changing in significant ways. Protocol Labs is nucleating a number of the engineering, open source, and operational teams into separate startups, engineering collectives, and foundations.

Mainnet is a term used to describe the default or "main" network that default settings connect to. This has mostly been "assumed" for the IPFS network, and not really highlighted for anyone other than protocol experts.

IPFS.io public gateway, that serve up content-addressed data through an HTTP gateway that every browser can access. This was run by Protocol Labs, and will now be a responsibility of the emerging IPFS Foundation, who in turn are relying on the new IP Shipyard organization to do the technical work to host and maintain the gateway.

IPFS Mainnet is the giant global network that uses the default bootstrap list, the default Distributed Hash Table (DHT) that helps locate content on the network, and all of the public and dedicated gateways that connect to it.

Quiet is a live chat app that uses IPFS to synch and connect devices, but on a network that is private to the connected devices

Performance, privacy, or other considerations are all reasons that you might not want to use Mainnet, while still relying on the same codebases and technology stack.

Fission's primary product is the Everywhere Computer. This is the platform we're building on top of the open protocol InterPlanetary Virtual Machine (IPVM) that we developed alongside a number of collaborators in the UCAN and IPVM working groups.

The Everywhere Computer lets you run compute everywhere. This is accomplished by supporting WebAssembly functions that are published to IPFS, and by fetching and storing data that needs to be computed to and from IPFS.

Note that we didn't say "IPFS Mainnet" there

The design of the Everywhere Computer will introduce the concept of Subnets.

However, our default public beta subnet (cool name and logo forthcoming!) will connect to IPFS Mainnet.