Looks like IPFS requires gx to manage its dependencies... which in turn uses IPFS. Not sure how to manage that in terms of debian's policies / having packages manage their own dependencies, but unless there's some way to shim the dependency on its dependency manager, we'll need gx to build ipfs.
See
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=850862 for wnpp request for gx