🚪 Gateways

Gateways are the portal through which all content loads. They are the reason you store content—so that you and other people can view it and download it.

All of Pinata’s content is avalable on the public IPFS network. This means that anybody running an IPFS node can access content stored on Pinata through their own IPFS node.

However, directly running a node isn’t the only way to access content, nor is it the easiest. The most common way to retrieve content on the IPFS network is through an IPFS gateway.

IPFS gateways are IPFS nodes that provide access to the IPFS network through a web URL that often takes the following form: https://example.gateway.com/ipfs/CID, where the CID is the content identifier (also known as a hash) for the content you want to retrieve.