Filecoin is a decentralized storage network, powered by a blockchain and a native token
Filecoin Token sale:
Funding complete
Filecoin successfuly raised $205M+ from 2,100+ investors
Get notified about new token sales:
Filecoin successfuly raised $205M+ from 2,100+ investors
Get notified about new token sales:
First Hour Averaging: All investments confirmed (with payment received) in the first hour of the sale will be treated fairly, and given the same price. This is to reduce the effect of luck in pricing for early investors. Investments that confirm after the first hour confirm on a first-come first-serve basis, as previously specified. Read more in our latest post.
More data will be created in 2017 than the previous 5,000 years of humanity. Yet around 50% of the world’s storage sits unused — from hard-drives in basements to data centers. Filecoin creates a frictionless market to put this extra storage to work. With significantly more supply, we can drop the price of storage and meet growing demand.
Filecoin uses IPFS, a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open. Each file has a unique fingerprint called a cryptographic hash. Indexing files by hash allows us to find and distribute high volumes of data with high efficiency. The peer-to-peer network rebalances and recovers in response to events, keeping data safe and flowing.
Today’s blockchains use wasteful Proof-of-work consensus. Filecoin is like Bitcoin, but with hard drives instead of hashers. The novel Proof-of-Replication function creates a useful and valuable storage service as a byproduct of the mining process. Miners are incentivized to be efficient: the more they store, the more filecoin they earn.
Put your unused storage to work by becoming a Filecoin miner. Use the Filecoin mining software to get paid for fulfilling storage or retrieval requests on the Filecoin market.
The Filecoin currency will be traded on a number of exchanges and supported by multiple cryptocurrency wallets, allowing you to easily exchange Filecoin for other currencies like US Dollars, Bitcoin, and Ether.
Clients can tune their storage strategy to suit their needs, creating a custom balance between redundancy, speed of retrieval, and cost. The worldwide Filecoin storage and retrieval markets make vendors compete to offer flexible options at the best prices.
Filecoin is like Bitcoin, but with hard drives instead of hashers. The novel Proof-of-Replication function creates a useful and valuable storage service as a byproduct of the mining process. Filecoin is the incentive structure, while IPFS addresses and moves content.
The Filecoin Token will be distributed to the 4 major participating groups in the Filecoin Network. These groups are critical to the network’s creation, development, growth, and maintenance. This allocation is written into the protocol itself and the Filecoin blockchain’s Genesis block. Allocations are vested for many years.
The Filecoin (FIL) token is the native crypto token of the Filecoin network, similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Filecoin is used to pay for storage, retrieval, and transactions in the network.
Filecoin is priced by markets and exchanges, as any other crypto token. Spacetime is what we call storage space over time. It is the good or service sold by miners. The Filecoin price floats above the price of storage: Miners list their spacetime storage prices denominated in Filecoin. As the network grows — gathering more storage and clients — the total amount of Filecoin remains limited, creating upward price pressures.
We are driven to make Filecoin the de-facto way to use and sell the world’s cloud storage. It will take years to build a massive network, to bring all the latent storage online, and to build a network more reliable and cost effective than today’s centralized and powerful cloud computing organizations. We have structured the Filecoin token sale to reward investors who believe in the long term future of the network and work with us to achieve it directly. The majority of all Filecoin will go to those who create the core value of the network: the storage providers (miners). Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation will each get a small percentage of the token supply, which will be used to drive research, development, and deployment of the Filecoin network.
Protocol Labs, Inc. is a U.S. company building foundational internet infrastructure technology. Founded in 2014 by Juan Benet, it operates as a research, development, and deployment lab for network protocols
Protocol Labs leads groundbreaking internet projects, such as IPFS, the decentralized web protocol; libp2p, a modular network stack for peer-to-peer apps and systems; CoinList, a token sale and investment platform; and Filecoin, a decentralized file storage network and protocol token. Protocol Labs works openly, and is focused on the creation of value at a massive scale.
The Protocol Labs core team includes deep expertise in distributed systems, cryptography, fintech, open source software development, and open source community management.
Over 1,700 individuals and institutions across the globe have contributed to open source projects led by Protocol Labs. We will continue to foster this remarkable community. In some cases, we expect to use RFPs to incentivize specific contributions.
IPFS — The InterPlanetary File System — is a next-generation protocol to make the Web faster, safer, decentralized, and permanent. Since the IPFS release in January 2015, it has gained enormous traction in a variety of industries and organizations. By 2016, IPFS grew to be one of the most used and relied on technologies in the blockchain industry, and hailed by thousands of developers as "The Future of the Web." IPFS and Filecoin are complementary protocols, and the industry renowned and trusted core developers of IPFS are also developing Filecoin.
We do not know what the future holds, but we think it’s going to be filled with exciting challenges, important projects, and groundbreaking results. We’ve had much of that already, and we look forward to decades more. Alongside our supporters, investors, open source contributors, and many other collaborators, we will be working relentlessly to achieve our mission and realize our projects. Stay tuned, and thank you.
For general questions, please email filecoin-sale@protocol.ai
For press inquiries, please email press@protocol.ai
The following documents are available for download and review
Overview of Filecoin network, token details, and token sale.
Details of the token allocations, sale pricing, vesting, and release schedules
Instructions for preparation steps before the sale begins, and how to use CoinList during the sale.
Technical whitepaper for Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network
Research background, results achieved so far and to be achieved, known future work, remaining open problems, and more.
Technical paper on the Proof of Replication
Simple Agreement for Future Tokens.
Describes company, terms of the offering, and risks of the investment.
The world of ICOs could use a bit more structure, according to Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs, a venture-backed company s building a decentralized storage marketplace called Filecoin and that also worked with AngelList this year to create CoinList.
Juan Benet and Jesse Clayburgh of Protocol Labs, and Ryan Zurrer of Polychain Capital, discuss the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT).
One of the most anticipated of these, Filecoin, launches its token sale, which features ome innovative design choices. foos initial coin offering is also notable because it is pioneering a new method for holding token sales.
Filecoin will give people with excess computer storage an incentive to let other people store and retrieve files there. This means everything from extra storage drives to underutilized data centers could join the system and earn cryptocurrency by hosting other people's files (all locked up in super strong encryption).
Juan Benet is the founder of Protocol Labs (YC S14). Dalton Caldwell is a Partner at YC. In this episode of the podcast we discuss IPFS, CoinList, and the Filecoin ICO.
The team behind IPFS and Filecoin explain how advances in distributed data storage and strong alignment of market incentives are combining to create a much more secure and efficient web.
People in the real world are hard at work trying to rebuild the internet in a way that comes closer to its decentralized ideal.
Coinlist enables developers to raise the funds they need to launch the network without issuing a token that could later be perceived as a security.
As most of you know all of us at Union Square Ventures believe in the decentralized, emergent, permissionless innovation that was so central to the vitality of the early Internet.
Since it first appeared, the distributed file system IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) has generated a ton of interest and momentum.
The purpose of the Filecoin currency is to create a fungible token that can be spent to hire the miner network to store files.
All information and analyses are estimates utilizing publicly available, company provided information (e.g., Filecoin whitepaper), contractor information, and third party data sources. None of the information has been verified by the company or any other third party.
Historical performance or other information regarding the likelihood of token performance or various outcomes are hypothetical in nature and are not guarantees of future results.
NOTE: The tokens will be subject to transfer restrictions following the network launch. These restrictions are released linearly following the network launch. Tokens subject to the transfer restriction will not be transferrable, distributable or usable by investors.
Please read SAFT and Private Placement Memorandum for more information.
Participating in tokens, digital assets, or cryptocurrencies carries a very high degree of risk. Only investors familiar with acquiring tokens, digital assets, or cryptocurrencies should consider this opportunity. No investor should invest in the Fund unless it can tolerate total loss of all invested capital
There is limited public information about the token. The price at which the investor is agreeing to purchase the token may not represent current fair market valuation. Investors should assume that the company generally possesses material information about the company not known to the investor or the public. Investors should perform their own due diligence prior to investing
Regulatory changes or actions may alter the nature of, or restrict the use of, the tokens in a manner that adversely affects investments
The investor's investments in Digital Assets may subject the investor to tax and regulatory risks
Filecoin may be unable to successfully consummate the launch of its network, attract developers and new applications to drive users to the network and grow its user base through widespread use and adoption of the tokens
Filecoin may not be widely adopted and may have limited users
Filecoin may be the target of malicious cyberattacks or may contain exploitable flaws in its underlying code, which may result in security breaches and the loss or theft of tokens
There is no assurance of token delivery or other liquidity event
The investor may not have an accurate appraisal of the future valuation of the tokens
The tax treatment of the SAFT, the purchase rights contained therein and the token distribution is uncertain and there may be adverse tax consequences for Investors upon certain future events
The Ethereum blockchain network on which the token operates utilizes code that is subject to change at any time. These changes may have unintended consequences for Filecoin
The Filecoin network may be “forked” and clones that don’t represent the companies or investors could emerge. If one of these forks wins in the marketplace, the value of the Filecoin investment will go to zero
The implied valuation of the Filecoin network, once all Filecoin are issued, is in the $1B - $2B range. The investment may only be profitable if the value of all of the Filecoin to be mined crosses that
Results may vary materially from those expressed or implied in forward-looking statements (e.g., “expect”). Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in its forward-looking statements include government regulation, economic, strategic, political and social conditions.