What is Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is a perpetual file storage protocol that allows you to pay once for your files and store them forever. It makes sure that user files are stored forever. Lighthouse uses the miner network and storage capacity of the filecoin network and IPFS content-addressing system.

How are we different from existing storage systems?

• Perpetual Storage - Pay once and store forever
• Encryption and Private Data - Ability to store private and encrypted data without the hassle of managing the file's private key and build token-gated applications using Smart Contracts on any chain.
• Dedicated custom IPFS Gateway - This gateway serves and retrieves your files quickly. It even delivers multimedia content like 4k videos with speed. The retrieval speed can be slow if you've used Filecoin for data storage. Lighthouse effectively addresses this issue.
• Access Control - Using Lighthouse, you can control who has access to your stored data. This can be particularly useful when creating an NFT or privacy-focused dApp collection.
• Mutable data - With our support for IPNS, developers can create dapps that require updating the files and building applications like dynamic NFTs, file management services, etc.
• Pay using any token - Smart contracts run on popular EVM-based chains like ethereum, polygon, optimism, bsc, etc. hence direct integration with dapps of these ecosystems. Users can pay for storage via any token on the chain of their choice and get verifiable proof. Supporting Non-EVM-based chains like Solana as well.
• Lower fee - Our mechanism involves staking, accruing fees, and interest on the user's storage cost, leading to a lower fee than the current alternatives like Arweave.
• Verifiable storage - Provides users with verifiable storage proofs to know which miners are storing your data.

How to use Lighthouse in your project

The Lighthouse SDK and CLI are the simplest and most user-friendly tools for utilizing the Lighthouse protocol to store your DApp data. They seamlessly integrate all the services Lighthouse provides, including data encryption, high-speed retrieval, and access control.

👩‍💻Lighthouse SDK

You can also interact with Lighthouse protocol using Lighthouse SDK. Using Lighthouse SDK, you can use Lighthouse in the backend (NodeJS) or frontend (react, next.js, etc.) project.