What is Filecoin

Filecoin is a decentralised storage system aiming to “store humanity's most important information”. The project raised USD 205 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017 and initially planned a launch date around mid-2019.

However, there was a delay in the launch date for the mainnet until block 148,888, which finally happened in October 2020.

A Brief History of Filecoin

In 2014 the project was first taken as an incentive layer for the interplanetary file system (IPFS), a peer-to-peer storage network. Filecoin is an open protocol supported by a blockchain that records commitments made by the network's participants using FIL, the blockchain's native currency. This blockchain is both proof of replication (PoRep) and proof of spacetime (PoST). To secure financing for Filecoin's development, the team held a token sale in 2017, which collected over US$205 million, making it one of the largest token offerings at the time.

The Filecoin Foundation contributed 50,000 filecoins worth $10 million to the Internet Archive in April 2021. In addition, Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive, and Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships, joined the boards of advisors of Filecoin and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralised Web.

Filecoin attracted investors like 357 Investments, Boost VC, CSC Upshot, RRE Ventures, LombardStreet.io Ventures, Notation Capital, Carnaby Capital, Visary Capital, Ausum Ventures, Blockchain Fund Chelyabinsk, Blockchain Capital, Tethys Investment Management, and Pantera Capital.

The Filecoin blockchain contains transactions for sending and receiving FIL and storage miners' verification that they are successfully storing their files. Filecoin allows consumers to keep their files for very low prices while double-checking that they are correctly kept.

How Filecoin Works

The Filecoin network is a decentralised, peer-to-peer network made up of Filecoin peers who engage in different ways. Filecoin Nodes are peers who sync the Filecoin blockchain and verify the messages in each block, which offer a global state once applied. Storage providers serve the network by performing different sorts of deals and adding fresh blocks to the blockchain every 30 seconds, for which they get FIL rewards.

Storage agreements are deals between clients and storage providers to store data on the network. Retrieval deals are agreements between clients and retrieval providers (who may or may not also be storage providers) to recover data from the network (hopefully in a fast and reliable manner).

Filecoin clients and other storage providers continuously verify that the proofs contained in each block are valid, providing the essential security and penalising storage providers that do not follow their deals.

What is Filecoin Used for

Filecoin allows customers to store their data at ultra-low prices while verifying that they save correctly.

Users may pick their chosen trade-off between cost, redundancy, and speed by selecting the storage provider with the greatest storage offer for their requirements. Applications that use Filecoin may negotiate storage with any storage provider on the network. Unlike centralised storage systems, there is no need to build a different API for each provider.

By creating a broader free market for data storage, the price would fall due to large scalability. Bringing millions of computers from all around the globe together will result in a massive storage network. While Dropbox and iCloud have had hacks, a decentralised network eliminates a single point of attack, making it more difficult to compromise.

On the negative side, instead of contacting a single server, it requires accessing multiple servers to put together documents as needed. This is dependent on the availability of servers and the speed of the Internet. Employing the Filecoin cryptocurrency to handle transactions creates entry barriers since someone must acquire another coin and exchange it to utilise the service.