For years, people have asked us, "What's inside the pinata?" We're finally ready to show you. For the first time ever, we're opening up the pinata, and we're doing it in a big way.

Introducing the Gateway Plugins, Pinata's answer to plugin shops and app marketplaces. IPFS has always been incredibly powerful, but we started to ask ourselves, what if it could do more? What if, through the power of small integrations, your IPFS Gateway could gain superpowers? The answers to those questions, and more, are found in Gateway Plugins.

What Are Gateway Plugins?

Gateway Plugins is a plugin marketplace for developers who want to extend Pinata's IPFS Gateway functionality. Similar to other marketplaces, developers can build tools that serve an existing audience, thus getting immediate exposure for their work. Pinata, on the other hand, benefits by having a richer experience for all its customers because of the innovative plugins that extend what's possible with Dedicated IPFS Gateways.

Pinata users will be able to install Gateway Plugins at their gateway level or at the individual CID level, depending on the app. This creates a level of flexibility that bends to the needs of the customer. Developers will have a sandbox environment where they can test their plugins before requesting they be added to the Plugins Store.

Why Build Gateway Plugins?

Building apps is hard. Building apps in web3 is even harder. At times, distribution can feel impossible. Developers who build on Gateway Plugins can focus on building and leave the distribution to us.

Pinata has over 600,000 users, over a billion files pinned to IPFS, and sees petabytes of data flow through our Dedicated IPFS Gateways each month. Developers interested in reaching a web3 audience as fast as possible should consider building Gateway Plugins.

If that's you, click here.

What's Launching in the Plugins Store?

We're excited to launch with a number of plugins developed in house as will be rolling out plugins built by partners. Let's take a look.

Hot Swaps

One of the most requested features we get from customers is an IPNS-like solution that is flexible and performant. While IPFS is immutable, there are plenty of valid use cases for being able to swap out the content of an IPFS CID in an auditable way without having to change the entire URL. This works well for websites and NFTs as well as dozens of other use cases we've heard customers ask about in the past.

To use Hot Swaps, simply install the app at the gateway level, then you will be able to use both the Pinata Web App and the API to map new CIDs to an existing CID. For example, let's say you have an NFT project that you want to launch, but you're not ready to reveal. Rather than having to make an additional smart contract transaction to change the token URI, you can use Hot Swaps and keep the URI in tact while updating the content.

Moderator

IPFS is a public, permissionless protocol. This means that while it can host content that should be there, it can also host content that you or your users might find inappropriate. Running a gateway to distribute content has often meant manual content moderation. The Moderator Plugin solves this.

You can install this plugin and configure what you’d like to moderate. This will ensure content uploaded to your Pinata account runs through the appropriate moderation filters. Then, when that content is loaded through your gateway, if it doesn’t pass moderation, it is not served.

Content Addressable Attestation

Whether it is verifiability of content or provenance of data, we’ve seen an increasing need to prove something about the media we consume. As AI continues to improve, this need will continue to increase. The Content Addressable Attestation plugin helps solve this in an elegant way.

When enabled, your gateway will accept POST requests that map to a piece of content where the owner of the gateway can attest ownership and validity of a piece of content. This is done by tracking upload origin, requesting a wallet signature, and mapping it to an IPFS CID. The plugin allows for doing this through the browser or API.

When is it Launching?

Pinata's Gateway Plugins will be live soon. In the meantime, we're building an interest list and will enable this functionality for people on the list first.

If you're interested in using Gateway Plugins as part of your gateway experience, please click here.

If you're a developer that wants to build plugins for Gateway Plugins, please click here.

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