Brave’s IPFS local node support has a cost to Brave in terms of support and maintenance, distribution of binaries, and node updates. For each Kubo node update we need to sometimes change things in code, get it QA’d and get release management to release it.

It is nice to support things, but we do need to also acknowledge that doing so takes away from other things we could be doing. P3A data is showing we have 0.1% local node and 0% gateway setting. 99.9% of people are on an Ask setting which means they’ve never used IPFS.

It also opens up a larger attack surface because there’s more code and things running on a users’s machine for those that opt into it. 

This issue is to track deprecating and removing the local node support.