Nacho Coll

Founder & Principal, IPFS.NINJA — Blockchain Web Services (BWS)

Updated

I founded IPFS.NINJA in early 2024 after evaluating every IPFS pinning service on the market for a client project and concluding that the $20/month entry point most providers charged was a 4× markup on the same underlying cluster setup. Today I run [Blockchain Web Services (BWS)](https://bws.ninja), the AI-native solutions factory that builds and ships IPFS.NINJA alongside our other production products — starting at $5.

Nacho Coll

Background#

I’ve been building on AWS since 2007 — from the very early days of S3 and EC2, long before “cloud” was the default answer. As an AWS Enterprise Architect I designed production-scale systems for top-tier customers including LEGO, Nordea, Vueling, and others in the enterprise Fortune-500 tier. That’s where the operational instincts behind everything I do today were formed: cost discipline, multi-region reliability, and taking observability seriously from day one rather than bolting it on later.

Since 2019 I’ve been focused on two things in parallel: infrastructure for blockchain and decentralized-storage products, and the AI side of software delivery — bringing the same enterprise-architecture discipline to both. That’s the foundation Blockchain Web Services (BWS) runs on today: an AI-native solutions factory with a single operating slogan, Demand Becomes Product. We turn validated market demand into production-ready software — engineered by people, accelerated by AI, accountable end-to-end. Every line of code that ships from BWS is owned by a named engineer.

BWS ships several production products from that same discipline. IPFS.NINJA is one of them; others include:

  • OpenAgile.AI — engineering discipline for AI-assisted development.
  • Zellbox — CRM for appointment-driven SMBs: customers, bookings, and WhatsApp reminders in one inbox.
  • WallaWhats — real-time WhatsApp alerts when your favorite X/Twitter accounts post.
  • Badges.ninja — blockchain-verified digital badges with a visual designer and REST API.
  • IPFS.NINJA — the simplest IPFS pinning and upload API, with dedicated gateways and a generous free tier.
  • Blockchain Database — a single API to use the blockchain as a data layer.
  • NFT.zK — a straightforward API to mint NFTs without Web3 expertise.
  • Telegram XBot — a Telegram bot that tracks X activity and highlights top community contributors.

BWS pivoted to being AI-native in mid-2025. AI wasn’t a feature we added — it’s a company we became. The engineering bar didn’t change: what changed is how much research, scaffolding, and testing AI can now carry, so a small team can ship the same shape of production software that used to take a much larger one.

What we work on day-to-day#

My day-to-day spans the whole BWS solutions portfolio — directing roadmaps across the products, reviewing technical design with the team, tightening the AI-assisted delivery workflow that ships all of them, and keeping the engineering discipline consistent from one product to the next. Each product has its own weekly cadence; my job is the connective tissue between them.

For IPFS.NINJA specifically, we mostly focus on keeping the service tight and vertical: a REST API for uploading files (JSON, images, PDFs, arbitrary binaries), pin management, dedicated worldwide gateways, per-user analytics, signed upload tokens, and a Node/Python SDK — all on a free tier that’s actually usable, with paid tiers starting at $5/month instead of the $20 that’s become the market default. Areas the team has been hands-on with recently:

  • Upload path reliability — keeping the upload API fast under sustained load: request coalescing, multi-part upload paths for large files, and defensive retries so a transient failure between our edge and the IPFS cluster never surfaces as a lost file to the caller.
  • Pin durability — cross-node replication, reconciliation between our pin ledger and the underlying cluster state, and background sweeps that catch drift-on-disk before it becomes a broken CID.
  • Dedicated gateway performance — every paid plan gets its own gateway hostname. Keeping p95 latency low across regions, cache-hit ratios high, and hot content pre-warmed to the edge is a constant tuning job.
  • Feature surface — beyond the core upload/pin API, the platform ships folder uploads, CAR import for bulk migration off other providers, S3-compatible endpoints, IPNS record management, image-optimization at the gateway, signed upload tokens for browser-side uploads, an MCP server, and per-CID analytics. Each capability is a first-class endpoint, not a side project.
  • Cost engineering — the reason IPFS.NINJA can start at $5 while competitors start at $20 is not a loss-leader trick. It’s continuous work on our own infrastructure economics so the unit costs actually justify the retail price.
  • Customer support — we handle every ticket directly. If you email hello@ipfs.ninja, you’ll get a response from a real human — and most days, that human is me.

Articles I’ve written or reviewed#

Most posts on this site carry my byline. Some are drafted by an AI assistant (see the editorial process for the full workflow) and reviewed by me before publication; others are written end-to-end by the team. Either way, every code example is verified against the live API before publishing.

A few representative posts:

Browse the blog Editorial process