"The centralized ad-driven social networks are vulnerable and not focused on our rights. We need free, private, global communication! We need AKASHA!" - Juan Benet*

We are thrilled to announce that Juan Benet, the creator of the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), is joining the AKASHA team as Advisor.

Juan will be in great company as he joins Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, on our Advisory Board.

Juan created the IPFS Project, Filecoin, and other protocols that can be found here. He is also the founder of Protocol Labs, a company focused on improving how the Internet works. Before IPFS and Protocol Labs, he studied Computer Science at Stanford University.

The idea behind IPFS took shape in Juan's mind during 2014, while thinking of ways to solve the numerous problems that plague data sharing today.

A few months later, IPFS was born by combining the great ideas behind Git, BitTorrent, Kademlia, SFS, and the Web in the form of a distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, it is similar to the original aims of the Web, but IPFS is more similar to a single BitTorrent swarm exchanging git objects.

Today, from a simple idea, IPFS is live with thousands of nodes running across the world, has a big community of open-source contributors, and provides a simple interface similar to the HTTP web. However, the big difference is that permanence and versioning is built in. In other words, the "dream" of a permanent web is here and rapidly iterating.

This is why it made perfect sense to integrate this groundbreaking technology into AKASHA, as it provides a decentralized permanent data layer that works nicely with Ethereum.

By fusing IPFS with Ethereum, we get the best of both worlds: thanks to IPFS, we have a way to permanently store and distribute content in a peer to peer fashion on a global scale without all the blockchain limitations, while the Ethereum blockchain is used for micro-payments, strong identity, authentication, voting and verifiability.

For those that haven't dived into IPFS yet, watch this presentation that is masterfully delivered by Juan, where he covers both the concept behind it and the technical details:

Juan is now working relentlessly with the IPFS team on a JavaScript implementation which would make AKASHA, among other things, accessible in a peer to peer fashion directly from classic Web 2.0 browsers. Add all the cool things currently developed in the Ethereum ecosystem from BTCrelay to payment channels to DAOs and you'll get a glimpse of the fascinating things waiting to be explored.

With both Juan Benet and Vitalik Buterin at our side to advise us on the key technologies used to make AKASHA possible, we are bound to create something truly amazing.

Welcome aboard Juan!