A recent study Centralization in the Decentralized Web: Challenges and Opportunities in IPFS Data Management (2025) shows:
- Most content is hosted by a small fraction of nodes.
- Replication levels are low.
- Cloud-hosted nodes dominate storage and traffic.
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Abstract (from the paper):
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a pioneering effort for Web 3.0, well-known for its decentralized infrastructure. However, some recent studies have shown that IPFS exhibits a high degree of centralization and has integrated centralized components for improved performance. While this change contradicts the core decentralized ethos of IPFS and introduces risks of hurting the data replication level and thus availability, it also opens some opportunities for better data management and cost savings through deduplication.