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Blockchain Technology & Decentralization

20 posts · Sep 2018 – Nov 2025

What this trail covers

Cloudflare's platform has evolved to support Web3 development by offering managed gateways for Ethereum and IPFS, enabling developers to build scalable decentralized applications. This includes open-source examples for deploying and managing NFTs using Cloudflare Workers and Pages, providing a full-stack solution for minting, displaying, and serving NFT metadata. The platform aims to be foundational to the future of Web3, supporting Metaverses, DAOs, DeFi, and other decentralized applications. The evolution of Web3 is driven by the desire for a more decentralized and user-owned internet, building upon the principles of peer-to-peer networks and blockchain technology.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. Async QUIC and HTTP:3 made easy- tokio-quiche is now open-sourceThis post announces the open-sourcing of 'tokio-quiche,' a battle-tested asynchronous QUIC library that combines the 'quiche' QUIC implementation with the Rust Tokio async runtime. It powers critical services like Apple iCloud Private Relay and Cloudflare Warp, handling millions of HTTP/3 requests per second. The library aims to lower the barrier to entry for integrating QUIC and HTTP/3, promoting industry adoption of these new standards and privacy-preserving technologies. It utilizes an actor model for efficient asynchronous operations and provides abstractions for application protocols over QUIC, such as HTTP/3.
  2. Launching the x402 Foundation with Coinbase, and support for x402 transactionsThis post introduces the x402 protocol, a new open standard for machine-to-machine payments on the web, developed in partnership with Coinbase. It details the protocol's flow, enabling programmatic access to resources without traditional accounts. Cloudflare is integrating x402 into its Agents SDK and MCP servers, and proposing a deferred payment scheme for agentic payments, exemplified by a 'pay per crawl' use case. A live demo, the x402 playground, showcases these capabilities.
  3. Ethereum Gateway support for Görli + Sepolia Testnets and the Ethereum MergeThis post announces the Cloudflare Ethereum Gateway's support for the Ethereum Merge and the Görli and Sepolia testnets. It details the gateway's architecture, which uses Cloudflare Workers and Load Balancers to interact with Ethereum nodes. The post also explains the differences between Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, and Proof of Authority consensus mechanisms, highlighting the environmental benefits of Proof of Stake and Cloudflare's role in supporting the Ethereum Merge by running an authority node for the Görli testnet. It provides instructions on how to use the testnet gateways and announces the deprecation of Rinkeby testnet support.
  4. Proof of Stake and our next experiments in web3Cloudflare is launching experiments to help solve the scale and environmental challenges facing blockchain technologies. This includes launching and staking Ethereum validator nodes on the Cloudflare global network as Ethereum transitions from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). This initiative aims to research energy efficiency, consistency management, and network speed. The post details the inefficiencies of PoW and the benefits of PoS, highlighting its reduced energy consumption and enhanced security through self-interest and a large number of validators. Cloudflare's participation will add geographic and infrastructure decentralization to the Ethereum network.
  5. Public access for our Ethereum and IPFS gateways now availableThis post announces the public availability of Cloudflare's Ethereum and IPFS gateways, previously in private beta. Key technical contributions include the creation of a new end-to-end managed hostname deployment API, a dedicated Web3 UI within the Cloudflare dashboard, and planned testnet support. The gateways are built on Cloudflare's internal infrastructure, utilizing products like SSL for SaaS and Workers to provide features such as rate limiting, WAF rules, and custom logic. The post highlights the use cases for DeFi DAOs, NFT designers, and Dapp developers, emphasizing reliability, global reach, and ease of integration.
  7. Serving Cloudflare Pages sites to the IPFS networkThis post details the technical integration of Cloudflare Pages with the IPFS network. It explains how Cloudflare Pages content is transformed into IPFS CIDs (Content Identifiers) using a MerkleDAG structure, with optimizations for shared data. An IPFS Index Proxy, built on Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV, maps CIDs to data locations. A Cloudflare-hosted IPFS node serves this content. The post outlines the steps for users to opt-in, index their Pages content on IPFS, and make it accessible via DNSLink. It also touches upon the underlying IPFS concepts like nodes, peers, routing tables, datastores, and MerkleDAGs.
  8. Gaining visibility in IPFS systemsThis post introduces the IPFS Gateway monitor, an observability tool developed to measure the performance and reliability of IPFS gateways. It details the tool's architecture, including its three main components: `ipfs-gw-measure`, `ipfs-gw-monitor`, and a Prometheus Exporter. The post presents measurement results for various scenarios, including immutable IPFS content retrieval (cached, uncached, unavailable), mutable IPNS name resolution (newly created, existing, republished, cached, unavailable), and DNSLink website access (as hostname and path, for both IPFS and IPNS). Key findings highlight the significant performance benefits of caching IPFS content and the relative speed advantage of DNSLink over IPNS for naming resources. The tool and its findings are intended to inform future improvements to Cloudflare's IPFS gateway service and the broader IPFS ecosystem.
  9. Pairings in CIRCLThis post announces a major update to Cloudflare's open-source CIRCL cryptographic library, introducing enhanced support for pairing-based cryptography, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and quantum-resistant algorithms. It explains the mathematical underpinnings of pairings and their applications in cryptography, such as enabling efficient three-party Diffie-Hellman key exchange, identity-based encryption (IBE), zk-SNARKs, and verifiable randomness. The post highlights how these advancements build upon previous work in post-quantum experiments and key management, providing a foundational library for future innovations in decentralized systems and secure communication.
  10. Announcing The Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways Private Beta: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse and Decentralized Finance for EveryoneThis post announces the private beta of Cloudflare's Ethereum and IPFS gateways, aiming to simplify Web3 development by providing managed infrastructure for running Ethereum and IPFS nodes. It highlights the challenges of existing Web3 gateways, such as limited network size, lack of resilience, and potential for outages, and positions Cloudflare's global network as a solution for improved speed, security, and reliability. The post introduces the concept of gateways in the context of Web3 and explains how Cloudflare's offering can benefit Dapp developers by providing caching and other value-added services.
  11. Get started Building Web3 Apps with CloudflareThis post introduces Cloudflare's new Ethereum and IPFS gateways, designed to empower developers building Web3 applications. It details an open-source example application demonstrating the end-to-end process of minting and managing NFTs using Cloudflare Workers for metadata hosting and Cloudflare Pages for the web interface. The smart contract is deployed on Ethereum's Rinkeby test network and adheres to the ERC-721 specification. The architecture diagram illustrates the integration of Workers, Pages, and IPFS for NFT projects.
  12. Web3 — A vision for a decentralized webThis post introduces the concept of Web3 as the next evolution of the internet, building upon Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. It explains the core principles of decentralization, peer-to-peer networks, and blockchain technology, using Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples. The post discusses how these technologies enable decentralized applications (Dapps) and programmable blockchains as infrastructure for a distributed internet. It highlights the shift towards end-user control over data and the concept of decentralized identity, including Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and their application in proving ownership and identity. The post also touches upon Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as a medium for conveying ownership. Finally, it outlines Cloudflare's role in supporting Web3 through its existing privacy initiatives and its platform capabilities.
  13. How Cloudflare provides tools to help keep IPFS users safeCloudflare has released an open-source IPFS Safemode tool, built on go-ipfs, to protect users from malicious content like phishing and ransomware. The tool allows IPFS node operators to define and block specific CIDs (Content Identifiers). The post details the architecture of IPFS content retrieval, the challenges of filtering in a P2P network, and provides instructions on how to build and use the safemode capabilities.
  14. A Name Resolver for the Distributed WebThis post introduces a new Distributed Web Resolver built on Cloudflare Workers. It enables access to IPFS content indexed by ENS directly from web browsers by proxying ENS registered domains with a '.link' suffix. The resolver uses Cloudflare's Ethereum and IPFS gateways, allowing for local execution of components and reducing trust in a single entity. It addresses the need for human-readable identifiers in distributed systems by bridging ENS and IPFS with existing web infrastructure.
  15. Cloudflare's Ethereum GatewayThis post announces Cloudflare's Ethereum Gateway, a new tool in the Distributed Web Gateway suite. It allows users to interact with the Ethereum network via a custom hostname, enabling the integration of smart contracts into websites. The post explains Ethereum and smart contracts with examples, highlighting their differences from traditional contracts and the challenges of immutability and bugs. It also introduces the EVM's distributed and deterministic nature and discusses the importance of kill switches and standardized patterns like ERC-20 and ERC-721, referencing CryptoKitties as an example.
  16. Continuing to Improve our IPFS GatewayThis post details improvements to Cloudflare's IPFS gateway, focusing on enhancing performance, usability, and security for decentralized web content. Key contributions include: implementing an automatic cache purge mechanism using Workers and DNS-over-HTTPS to address long cache TTL complaints; introducing beta testing for Orange-to-Orange (O2O) to allow layered Cloudflare settings for custom domains; establishing a subdomain-based gateway at cf-ipfs.com for enhanced security and immutability by interpreting subdomains as content hashes; enabling session affinity with a custom load balancer to direct requests from the same user to the same IPFS node, minimizing redundant connections; and configuring IPFS nodes for persistent connections with Pinata to improve request performance and reliability.
  17. End-to-End Integrity with IPFSThis post introduces the use of Cloudflare's IPFS gateway to serve websites with end-to-end integrity. It details the setup process involving a special 'ipfs-sec' subdomain, DNSSEC configuration, and a CNAME setup. It also describes the development of a modified go-ipfs gateway that provides cryptographic proofs of content honesty and a browser extension to verify these proofs. An example application of a distributed search engine for StackExchange archives built on IPFS is also presented.
  18. Cloudflare goes InterPlanetary - Introducing Cloudflare’s IPFS GatewayIntroduced the Cloudflare IPFS Gateway, a new product within the Distributed Web Gateway project, enabling users to access IPFS content via HTTPS without installing IPFS software. This gateway serves as a platform for new, reliable, and secure web applications leveraging distributed web technologies.
  19. Welcome to Crypto WeekThis post, 'Welcome to Crypto Week,' significantly expands the 'Blockchain Technology & Decentralization' thread by introducing a broader theme of using cryptography to build a more trustworthy internet. It announces support for several new technologies that leverage cryptography, including the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) gateway, DNSSEC, RPKI for BGP routing security, Onion Services, and Roughtime for secure time synchronization. While not directly about blockchain applications, these announcements are framed as foundational steps towards decentralization and trust, directly aligning with the thread's core themes of enabling new internet architectures and reducing reliance on centralized trust mechanisms.