It took us some time, but finally, we proudly announce: esteroids.eth shows now also ENS+IPNS websites!
This extension adds around 300 new dWebsites to esteroids.eth search engine. We now have about 2,000 dWebsites available for you to search and browse.
Quite an achievement for such a young technology.
What’s IPNS?
IPNS is the flexible cousin of IPFS.
Let’s try to explain.
When you make an IPFS website, you get an IPFS CID. This IPFS CID is used by people to get your website from the IPFS network. Normally you connect your ENS name to this IPFS CID. This action is done on Ethereum blockchain, and is a quite expensive right now.
The problem is that every time you update your website - you get a new IPFS CID! So every time you need to update the ENS name of the website, and we already said it’s expensive, right? remember? we literally just said that!
IPNS literally solves this problem
When you create an IPNS website, you get an IPNS CID. The nice thing is that now this IPNS CID stays the same even if you update your website. So you need to connect your ENS name to this IPNS CID only once. That’s much cheaper.
The downside is that IPNS is harder to do, and often IPNS websites are slower to load.
That said, if you try hard enough, you can get IPNS right!
esteroids.eth is an ENS+IPNS website. It updates a few times a day, and we think its quite fast.
Esteroids and IPNS
So far esteroids.eth showed only ENS+IPFS websites. The main reason behind this is that when we started Esteroids, there were simply hardly any ENS+IPNS websites.
But things changed recently. Due to the high fees of Ethereum (that made ENS+IPFS websites very expensive), and due to improvement in IPNS technology, more and more people started to create ENS+IPNS websites.
We worked hard in the last few weeks to upgrade Esteroids search engine to support ENS+IPNS websitse.
What does it mean for visitors?
It just means now you get a fuller picture of what the dWeb has to offer. Search results will return way more websites. When you browse existing websites the offer is bigger.
What does it mean for buidlers?
Go ahead, build as many ENS+IPNS websites. We’re on it. We see you and make you visible.
What’s next for Esteroids?
Making IPNS websites is harder than making IPFS websites. That’s why we’re working on a service to make it easier.
Follow us on Twitter for more details.
