Filecoin

Filecoin (FIL) is a token powering the network with the same name, which is developed to provide its users with a decentralized data storage and management system. It was created to incentivize Interplanetary File System (IPFS), another well-known project concerning p2p data distribution, by the same founder — Jean Benet. Filecoin went through an ICO in 2017 and its mainnet launched in 2020.

Filecoin’s purpose is to avoid problems with the traditional file storage systems, such as clouds. Those centralized systems can become a single point of failure with catastrophic consequences — for example, data stored on them can be lost or corrupted. Filecoin allows its users to “shop” for storage node, or storage miner, with the best reputation, and choose their own trade-offs of the storage price versus data reliability and redundancy. Storage miners compete with each other for customers, aiming to provide the best deal and earn FIL for their storage. The same is true for retrieval miners (who may be the same nodes or different ones), who race to serve the data to the customer for a FIL fee. Filecoin network is secured using two unique proof systems. The first of them is Proof-of-Replication — as the miner receives a storage contract, he encodes the data and later must be able to show it in his storage. Second is Proof-of-Spacetime, which compels the miner to check a random data section.