Filecoin is a network that orchestrates distributed cloud services. Currently, their main offering is storage, but they are taking steps to evolve into data retrieval, and compute. Essentially looking to take over AWS and the cloud industry as a whole.
IPFS is the underlying system to store and retrieve distributed data. An analogy is me guiding you to find a book. I may tell you a location to go look for the book: “third shelve, the first row and 5th book”. Or, I may tell you a description of the book, title, author, ISBN, cover art, and you can ask around and find the nearest copy available. The current internet storage relies on the former, while IPFS uses the latter.
The main benefit of IPFS is data retrieval times and costs, if there are multiple copies of data, retrieving the copy which is closest to you is faster, and cheaper.
Filecoin’s native token $FIL is the key unlock for driving economic growth and adoption, and it seems to have been working so far. Since launch, it has grown to 11 EiB’s of capacity, with 1400 PiB being used, growing from 200 PiB a year ago, and 28 PiB two years ago.
It’s crystal clear, over the past years, Filecoin has proven to become a sustainable data storage solution, growing usage by ~10x for two years straight.
Juan Benet is the sole founder of Protocol Labs. After graduating from BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford, Juan decided to pursue his passion for distributed systems and founded Protocol Labs in 2014, an organization for research, development and deployment of network protocols, to improve the internet.
After YC in 2014, Protocol Labs raised a seed round in 2016 from led by BlueYard, USV, and angels like Naval and Fred Ehrsam.
Then in 2017, Filecoin had one of the largest ICOs, raising 205M + a 52M presale with participation of Sequoia, a16z, and a double down from USV.
The ICO was done using their proprietary platform CoinList, which was acquired by AngelList, and the price per token was pegged at $1.
The economics of Filecoin are controversial for their high inflation rates, but they make sense.
$FIL, the native token is used to incentivize the storage and orchestrate the different actors in the network. Storage providers mine $FIL by providing storage services, or committing capacity, the miners are subject to slashing if their storage does not pass the reliability check.
The main utility of $FIL is to pay for storage services, and to serve as a gas token for the FVM blockchain.