Inefficient data management has been the Achilles heel of blockchain-based decentralized applications (dApps). An off-chain storage layer, which lies between the application and the blockchain layers, can improve space efficiency and data availability with erasure codes and decentralized maintenance. This paper presents two fundamental components of such storage layer designed and implemented for the IPFS network. The IPFS Community is a component built on top of the IPFS network that encodes and decodes data before uploading to the network. Since data is encoded with alpha entanglement codes, the solution requires less storage space than the native IPFS solution which replicates data by pinning content with the IPFS Cluster. To detect and repair failures in a timely manner, we introduce the monitoring and repair component. This novel component is activated by any node and distributes the load of repairs among various nodes. These two components are implemented as pluggable modules, and can, therefore, be easily migrated to other distributed file systems by adjusting the connector component.

翻译：低效的数据管理一直是基于区块链去中心化应用的致命弱点。位于应用层与区块链层之间的链下存储层，通过纠删码与去中心化维护，能够提升空间效率与数据可用性。本文提出了为IPFS网络设计与实现的此类存储层的两个基础组件。IPFS社区组件构建于IPFS网络之上，在数据上传至网络前对其进行编码与解码。由于数据采用Alpha纠缠码进行编码，该方案所需存储空间少于原生IPFS解决方案——后者通过IPFS集群固定内容来复制数据。为及时检测并修复故障，我们引入了监控与修复组件。这一创新组件可由任意节点激活，并将修复负载分散至多个节点。上述两个组件以可插拔模块形式实现，因此仅需调整连接器组件即可轻松迁移至其他分布式文件系统。