Crust
Crust is a decentralized storage network with a chain of its own, and its pinning product is the only one in this section with no account and no invoice. Storage is ordered on chain and served by staked nodes, so the thing that normally ends a pinning relationship — a company deciding to stop — has no obvious counterpart.
A wallet signature in place of a token#
Crust’s W3Auth pinning service implements the standard
Pinning Service API surface and
then replaces the one part that assumes a vendor. The specification says the
Authorization header carries a bearer token; Crust carries a signature
instead:
|
|
SignedMsg is the public key signed by its own private key, so the header
proves control of an address rather than possession of something a company
issued. Substrate chains, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Near, Avalanche, and Aptos
are all accepted, which means an application that already has a connected wallet
has everything it needs to authenticate.
Because the surrounding shape is unchanged, Kubo still talks to it as an ordinary remote service — the token is constructed rather than copied from a dashboard:
|
|
A matching W3Auth gateway accepts the same header for write operations over HTTP.
What the guarantee actually is#
Nodes stake the network’s native token and are rewarded for holding the files covered by on-chain storage orders, with the order recording what should be stored and for how long. Retention therefore depends on the network’s economics continuing to make storing that order worthwhile, rather than on a contract with a named counterparty.
“No invoice” is not “no cost”: placing a storage order means holding and spending the network’s native token, so a billing relationship is replaced by an exposure to a token price rather than removed.
The assurance is a different risk rather than an absent one, and weaker than the Filecoin equivalent in the sense that matters: Filecoin providers post recurring proofs against a deal and lose staked collateral for failing them, which gives an outside observer something to check. Crust’s rests on the network’s own accounting. For a content identifier (CID) whose loss would matter, this is a second pin rather than the only one.
Self-hosting the endpoint#
The pinning service is open source and deployable, which makes it one of the few ways to run a Pinning Service API endpoint that authenticates arbitrary wallets without building the auth layer. Pointed at a local IPFS Cluster, it turns a private cluster into something an application’s users can pin to with a signature.