When Blockchain Meets Distributed File Systems: An Overview, Challenges, and Open Issues

Constructing globally distributed file systems (DFS) has received great attention. Traditional Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distributed file systems have inevitable drawbacks such as instability, lacking auditing and incentive mechanisms. Thus, Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) and Swarm, as the representative DFSs which integrate with blockchain technologies, are proposed and becoming a new generation of distributed file systems. Although the blockchain-based DFSs successfully provide adequate incentives and security guarantees by exploiting the advantages of blockchain, a series of challenges, such as scalability and privacy issues, are also constraining the development of the new generation of DFSs. Mainly focusing on IPFS and Swarm, this paper conducts an overview of the rationale, layered structure and cutting-edge studies of the blockchain-based DFSs. Furthermore, we also identify their challenges, open issues and future directions. We anticipate that this survey can shed new light on the subsequent studies related to blockchain-based distributed file systems.