In this chapter, we are going to combine a smart contract with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to build a decentralized video-sharing application (similar to YouTube but decentralized). We will use a web application as the frontend for the blockchain and IPFS. As stated previously, IPFS is not a blockchain technology. IPFS is a decentralized technology. However, in a blockchain forum, meetup, or tutorial, you may hear IPFS being mentioned quite often. One of the main reasons for this is that IPFS overcomes the weakness of blockchain, which is that its storage is very expensive.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Architecture of the decentralized video-sharing application
- Writing the video-sharing smart contract
- Building the video-sharing web application