Filecoin is a project we haven’t been talking about too much on the channel and we thought we’d right that wrong today. It’s one of the older crypto projects around, but the promise of its idea, combined with some positive news and upgrades could bring in a new era of growth.
Filecoin is a decentralized storage system that aims to “store humanity’s most important information” as they put it. The project raised 205 million dollars in an initial coin offering in 2017, and initially planned a launch date for mid-2019. However, the launch date for the Filecoin mainnet was pushed back until 2020 when a specific block was mined.
Filecoin was founded by Juan Benet, who also created the Interplanetary File System. Benet is an American computer scientist who studied at Stanford University. After founding Protocol Labs in May 2014, he attended Y Combinator in the summer of 2014 with the intention of supporting both IPFS and Filecoin, as well as other projects.
Decentralized storage systems like Filecoin allow people to be the custodians of their data, as well as make the web more accessible to people worldwide. Since participating in the Filecoin network by mining and storing is directly related to winning more block rewards, Filecoin incentivizes participants to act honestly and store as much data as possible.