For the DAO, Web2 is such an important tool in the everyday life. We use it to consume media, communicate with friends and colleagues, learn, handle our finances, and much more. But the web as we know it has a problem: the information on it is largely centralized. It’s all stored on big server farms, which are usually controlled by a single company.
But
Have you ever wondered what would happen if sites like YouTube or Wikipedia would go offline?
How would you watch cat videos or spend hours reading one Wikipedia page after the other?
Centralization brings another problem with it, and that is censorship. Because content is hosted on just a few servers it’s easy for governments to block access to them. For example, in 2017 Turkey ordered internet providers to block access to Wikipedia because the administration called it “a threat to national security.” Essentially, centralization of the internet is not a good thing一especially when you are dealing with decentralized assets on places like app.shapeshift.com.
In order to bypass the limitations of centralized hosting, ShapeShift DAO began the journey to decentralizing our frontend through IPFS (Interplanetary Filesystem). June 2nd, 2022, marked the day that ShapeShift cut over to decentralized hosting on IPFS. This effectively means that the ShapeShift app is no longer subject to the issues of centralized web2 hosting. Anyone can now take the client, build and verify against what is on IPFS, and host a copy themselves, another major milestone in ShapeShift’s complete decentralization. CDN (content delivery network) or DNS (domain name system) are no longer points of failure for our app. Once we launch FOXChain一granting us decentralized access to node data一there will be no centralized or censorable part of the entire stack; meaning that ShapeShift would be completely unstoppable.
In case you want to hear the answers to:
Then check out our DAO's artile on Medium.
See you soon! 🦊
