Filecoin

Filecoin Primer
July 25, 2017

PUBLIC DRAFT 1

Protocol Labs, Inc.

[email protected]
Introducing Filecoin
Filecoin is a decentralized storage network,
powered by a blockchain and a native token.

In the span of less than three decades, the world wide web has become one of the greatest
achievements in human history. Today, we stand at the cusp of another transformation in
computing.

Emerging technologies are transforming the web’s underlying protocols. Using blockchain
technology, decentralized networks are processing enormous amounts of value in trust,
verification, storage, and payments.

Together, they pave the way for distributing humanity’s trove of public and private
knowledge across a vast, resilient, and efficient network.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This document may contain forward-looking statements, subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

1. Introducing Filecoin

2. Crypto Mining
3. Overview

4. Ecosystem
5. IPFS

6. Token, Allocations
7. Protocol Labs Team
 
 Unlocking the world’s unused storage to
meet the demands of tomorrow

The world’s storage is vastly underutilized

More data will be created in 2017 than the previous 5,000
years of humanity1. Yet around half of the world’s storage
sits unused2 —  from hard-drives in basements to data
centers. Filecoin creates an incentivized market to put this
extra storage to work. With significantly more supply, we
meet growing demand while lowering the price of
storage.

Decentralization creates a better network

Filecoin uses IPFS, a peer-to-peer distributed network
protocol which indexes each file by a unique fingerprint.
Indexing files by these fingerprints, known as
cryptographic hashes, allows us to find and distribute
high volumes of data with high efficiency. The peer-to-
peer network also rebalances and recovers in response to
outages, creating a more decentralized and resilient web.

Filecoin is a token with fundamental value

Filecoin is like Bitcoin, but miners amass hard drives
instead of hashing computers. Today’s blockchains use a
wasteful Proof-of-Work consensus. Filecoin uses a novel
Proof-of-Replication function to create a useful and
valuable storage service as a byproduct of the mining
process. Miners are incentivized proportionally: the more
they store, the more filecoin they earn.
Bitcoin mining began by cobbling together spare hardware. Today, industrial Bitcoin mines use special purpose hardware.
Source: 99bitcoins Source: Allied Control

The profits from mining Bitcoin and Ethereum have assembled

the world’s most powerful computing networks3

Bitcoin miners around the world run large scale data centers with millions of computers. In aggregate, they earn billions of dollars per year.
 Mining Revenues


Bitcoin Ethereum
Year BTC USD (EOY) ETH USD (EOY)

2012 2,520,000 $ 34M

- -
2013 1,314,000 $ 959M
- -
2014 1,314,000 $ 411M
- -
2015 1,314,000 $ 559M 4,320,000 $ 4M

2016 987,300 $ 941M 10,512,000 $ 84M

2017 630,720 $ 1.5B 10,512,000 $ 2.7B

TOTAL 8,080,020 $ 4.4B 25,344,000 $ 2.8B

(since 2012)

1 $ 2,309 1 $ 265
WORTH
TODAY
16,422,188 $ 18.6B 25,344,000 $ 6.7B

For simplicity, mining totals do not include transaction fees or uncle rewards. Bitcoin mining started in 2008, we consider only from
2012 in this total. Ethereum totals do not include Genesis allocations. TOTAL calculated based on EOY price for each currency. WORTH
TODAY calculated with prices on 2017-07-01. Data source: https://www.coinmarketcap.com.

Bitcoin Network Hash Rate

In less than a decade, Bitcoin has become the

world’s most powerful computing network4

• Hash rate greater than 6 exahashes per second5

• Estimated annual electricity consumption is 13.72 TWh, equivalent to
the power consumed by the entire country of Slovenia6
• Mining power spent on useless computation, wasting precious electricity

What if we could maintain consensus without wasting power?

What if we could make the mining process do something useful?

We can do better…

13.72 terawatts!!!
 


Filecoin

A decentralized storage network, powered by a blockchain

and a token. Built by Protocol Labs.

Earn Filecoin for hosting files and mining Exchange Filecoin for tokens or fiat
Mine Filecoin by putting your unused storage to work. Filecoin Once the network launches, the Filecoin token can be traded
is a blockchain where mining requires storing files, instead of on crypto asset exchanges and stored with various wallets.
computing hashes. Use the Filecoin mining sotware to get Miners and clients may exchange Filecoin for other currencies
paid for mining new blocks, processing transactions, storing like ETH, BTC, USD, RMB, EUR, and more.
files long term, or servicing retrieval requests.

Cutting-edge tech × proven platforms

Filecoin is the culmination of years of cutting-edge research
and development, featuring several important cryptography
Reliable storage at competitive prices
and blockchain inventions. This novel work builds on powerful
Clients can tune their storage strategy to suit their needs, and proven platforms. Filecoin uses IPFS for addressing and
creating a custom balance between redundancy, speed of moving data, libp2p for ubiquitous and IoT friendly network
retrieval, and cost. The worldwide Filecoin storage and connectivity, IPLD for interoperability with other blockchains,
retrieval markets make vendors compete to offer flexible and Ethereum for its core blockchain functionality and smart
options at the best prices. contracts.
 Filecoin Mining

More storage, higher reward Storage as mining power

Filecoin rewards miners for the storage they provide Filecoin is like Bitcoin, but miners amass hard drives
to the network. This happens in two parts. First, instead of hashing computers. The amount of storage
miners collect fractions of clients’ payments over is what counts as power toward the Filecoin
time, by continuously proving they are replicating the consensus, for both security and rewards. This is
clients’ data. Second, miners can collect block achieved through sequential Proofs-of-Replication
rewards for mining blocks, similar to Bitcoin and over clients’ data. This creates a valuable storage
Ethereum. Storage rewards are proportional to the service as a byproduct of the mining process.
amount of storage miners contribute to the service.

Resilience and self-healing

Data is stored using Erasure Coding (EC) and
Faster distribution, higher reward Information Dispersal Algorithms (IDA). This means
Miners collect strong rewards for distributing content smarter and more resilient replication, with lower
to clients, and for doing so quickly. When a client storage overhead. These algorithms have parameters
wishes to retrieve some content, the miner who clients can tune, putting them in as much control as
delivers it fastest will collect the rewards. This creates desired. Further, the network can detect missing
strong incentives for minimizing latency and nodes and re-allocate all the pieces they stored to
maximizing bandwidth, effectively causing adaptive other miners who can reconstruct them thanks to
and fast CDN-like behavior. The strongest rewards will erasure coding. Thus, the Filecoin network self-heals!
go to miners who are well-located in the network —
i.e. close to many clients — such as ISPs, collocated With these strategies, digital information can achieve
servers, or even physical neighbors. new levels of permanence and persistence, even in
the face of accidental outages or malicious attacks.
 Technical Details



Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network

Juan Benet, Nicola Greco, Protocol Labs


Protocol Labs research over the last two years
culminated in a new, significantly upgraded Filecoin
protocol. We outline a few key inventions and features
in the following sections. For complete technical
details, please see the full technical whitepaper.
https://filecoin.io/filecoin.v2.pdf

Full Node Storage

Full nodes store (a) the Filecoin Blockchain, which includes the latest Allocation Table, Order Book, and Transactions; and (b)
storage sectors with the clients’ data. The blockchain is far smaller than the storage sectors, and the cryptographic seal does not
increase the size of the stored data, it has zero storage overhead!

Blockchain Data Sectors

01100010 01110101 01111001 01100110 01101001 01101100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01101001 01101110 00100000 01011000 01100010 01101101 01101010 01100100 01110000 01110110 00100000 01111001 01100011 01100011 01111001 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110100 01101010 01111010
01100101 01101100 01110100 01100011 01100101 00100000 01100111 01101001 01111001 00100000 01101010 01101110 01101010 01110000 01110110 01110110 01101101 00100000 01110111 01110011 00100000 01100010 00100000 01101000 01111001 01111001 01110001 01111010 01110010 00100000

Allocation
01101111 01101001 01100001 01100111 00100000
01110010 01101111 01111001 01110001 01111000
01101001 01110001 01110001 01111001 00100000
01100011 01111001 01100101 01101110 01110110 00100000 01101101 01100011 00100000 01110101 01101001 01101010 01110001 01110110 01100011 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100010 01110011 01101001 00100000 01101000 01100110 01101101
00100000 01110111 01110001 00100000 01110111 01110010 01110011 01101101 01110000 01101001 00101110 00100000 01010110 01100011 01110011 01110010 01101100 01110001 01101011 01100010 00100000 01001110 01100101 01100010 01101000
01011010 01100011 01111010 01100011 01110010 00100000 01111010 01101001 01110011 01110111 00100000 01101110 01100011 01101001 01100111 01110010 01110111 01111010 00100000 01110000 01101100 00100000 01110111 01110100 01100011

Table
00100000 01101000 01101101 01101110 01111010
00101110 00100000 01000110 01100011 01110110
01100111 00101100 00100000 01111010 01110010
00100000 01110100 01100010 01110100 01111001 00100000 01100111 01111001 00101100 00100000 01100010 01110000 01100101 01100101 01110110 01101101 01100110 00100000 01101001 01100011 01110001 01111001 01110111 01100011 01100011
00100111 01100111 00100000 01100011 01101001 01110010 01101101 01101101 01100011 00100000 01111001 01110101 00100000 01101011 01110001 01100111 01101001 00100000 01101010 01101101 01110001 01110001 01100101 01101101 01100101
01110100 01101010 01101101 01110011 01101100 00100000 01100101 01101100 01110001 01100111 01101101 00100000 01101010 01101001 01101001 00100000 01100010 01110100 01110110 00100111 01100101 00100000 01100001 01100011 01100010
01100010 00100000 01100111 01110000 00100000 01100110 01100011 01100110 01111010 01111001 00101110 00100000 01010110 01101011 01110001 01110000 01101110 01110011 01111000 00100000 01010001 01111001 01101001 01110111 01110000 01101111 01101111 01110110 00101110 00100000
01010011 01110000 01101100 00100000 01110010
01110000 00100000 01110111 01111001 01111000
01110000 00100000 01100110 01100111 01100001
Cryptographically Sealed
01110100 00100000 01101010 01110000 00100000 01101010 01110100 01110011 01101101 00100000 01110110 01110100 00100000 01101000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01110101 01110000 01110110 01100111 01111010 01100111 00100000 01100111
01100010 00100000 01111010 01101010 01101000 00100000 01100011 01110110 01110010 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110111 01100110 01100110 01110001 01111001 01110111 00101100 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100010 00100000 01100111
01101101 00100000 01110100 01110010 00100000 01100011 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101100 00100000 01110101 01100010 01111001 01111001 00100000 01111010 01110000 01110111 01110010 01110011 01101011 01100111 01110100 00100000

Orderbook
01110101 01101100 01101001 00100000 01101101
01110000 01110000 01110110 01110101 00101110
01100011 01100101 01110110 01110110 01101101
Encrypted Data
01111001 01101100 01100011 01100010 01101011 01110010 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100110 01101010 00100000 01101110 01100011 01101001 01100111 01110010 01110111 01111010 00100000 01110000 01111010 00100000 01101101 01111001
00100000 01000010 01101101 01111001 01110100 01101001 01101100 00100000 01010010 01101001 01111001 01101000 01100111 01111010 01101001 00101110 00100000 01010110 00100000 01111000 01101001 01110011 01110001 01101100 00100000
01100101 00100000 01100011 01111001 00100000 01100011 01100011 01111000 01111010 01110111 01100111 01110010 00100000 01100010 01100010 00100000 01110101 01100010 01100011 00100000 01101110 01110110 01101110 01110011 01110000
01101010 01101101 01100001 01101010 01111001 01101100 01101000 01101101 01100100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01101000 01101101 01100001 01100101 01100011 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100010 01111010 01110011 00100000 01101111 01101001 01101011 01110101 00100000 01101101
01100011 01111010 01101010 01111010 01100101 01100011 00100000 01110110 01110110 01101001 01100001 00100000 01110101 01101001 00100000 01110010 01101101 01110111 01100100 01101001 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100010 01110010 01101111 01111000 01100111 01110011 01101111
00100000 01100101 01110011 01110001 00100000 01100111 01110101 01101110 01101101 01100110 00100000 01111001 00100000 01101001 01101101 01110010 01110110 01100111 01110011 00100000 01110111 01110011 00100000 01101010 01101110 00101110 00100000 01010010 01101101 01110111
01111000 01100101 01110101 00100000 01011000 01101101 01110011 01100111 01111001 01110000 01111000 01110111 01111001 00100000 01000001 01100111 00100000 01110010 01110111 00100000 01100001 01110000 01101110 00100000 01111010 01101010 01110100 01110100 01101001 01111000
01110011 00100000 01101001 01100001 01111010 00100000 01100001 01110000 01110100 01100011 01100001 00100000 01110011 01101000 00100000 01100001 01101101 01100001 00100000 01100010 01111000 01100011 01110110 01100011 01101100 01111000 01100111 00100000 01110011 01110110
Transactions
01100010 01110110 01100001 01100110 00100000
00100000 01110101 01101110 01100010 01110011
01110100 01111010 00100000 01101000 01101101 01110101 01110011 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110000 01101111 01100101 01101101 00100000 01100010 01111010 00100000 01110011 01110010 01110011 01111010 01101110 01110101 01111001
01110011 01110111 01101000 00100000 01100001 01110000 01110011 01101111 01110010 01101110 01110110 01101010 00100000 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101011 01110001 01100111 01101001 01101001 01110011 01111001 00100000 01101011
01100011 01101101 01110110 01110111 01101011 01110110 01110100 01100111 00101110 00100000 01010000 01110100 01101010 01110000 01110110 01110110 00100000 01000011 01111000 01100011 01100110 01101000 01100110 01101010 01110001 01111000 01101001 01110100 00000000 00000000

The Proof-of-Replication
The Proof-of-Replication functions cryptographically verify that every copy is stored independently, and allow this fact to be
checked periodically. Each unique replica is generated by cryptographically sealing the data at the time of storage, using a per-
replica encryption key. The Seal and Proving functions are chosen such that generating a new Seal cannot be performed fast
enough to compromise the proof. These proofs also create a publicly verifiable record that the miner correctly stored the data as
promised, and was online to serve it. The Filecoin Blockchain uses Proof-of-Replication in its mining process, to reward miners for
storing files, to punish miners who fail their contracts, and to detect and recover any missing pieces.

Honest prover seals Prove

Prover
Send file Verify
to honest prover Challenge Verify
Verifier and attacker timeout

Attacker Attacker must first seal, then prove

Attacker stores data without sealing
Time
 

Filecoin: Lifecycle of a File

1. PUT: Clients send information about the file, storage duration,

and a small amount of filecoin to the Storage Market as a bid.
Simultaneously, Miners submit asks, competing to offer low cost
storage. Deals are made in the Storage Market, on the blockchain.
3. MANAGE: Miners continuously prove they
1. Client are storing all sectors they agreed to store.
The client's payment is released in installments.
Miner Additional currency is minted over time and
awarded to Miners as a block reward,
3. Miner proportional to the storage they provide.

Bids and asks

The Filecoin
Replication
are matched on the

Proof of
Blockchain Storage Market, and
secured on the
blockchain. +

OR FS
DER OO
S PR
& Allocation Table Hash

2. SEND: The Client then sends the file to

Proof of Replication

the Miner, and the Miner adds the file to

a sector. The sectors are cryptographically
sealed, with verification sent to the The Retrieval Market
blockchain. continuously optimize for
4. Client maximum delivery speed
and minimal bandwidth
2. Client usage across distance,
around power outage,
overloaded servers,
and hostile censorship.

Miner
Miner
4. Request: A Client
GET: A Client requests
requests a fileawith
file with
some some payment
payment
in filecoin to the Retrieval Market (off chain); the first
Miner to send the file is paid. Eventually, the contract
expires and the storage is once again free.

 A Decentralized Market for Storage
The Filecoin network achieves staggering economies of scale by allowing anyone worldwide to participate as a
storage provider. It also makes storage resemble a commodity or utility by decoupling hard-drive space from
additional services. On this robust global market the price of storage will be driven by supply and demand, not
corporate pricing departments, and miners will compete on factors like reliability, price, and reputation.

Storage Market Retrieval Market

• On-chain Bid and Ask orders • Off-chain Bid and Ask orders
• Global price discovery & optimization • Uses Payment Channels
• Enables storage provider competition to • Minimizes request latency
give clients the best prices • Small but well-located miners can earn
• Miners with large amounts of storage or significant revenue
operation cost advantages can earn • Regional hubs automatically optimize
significant rewards • Hubs continue working through network
partitions
 Filecoin is an ecosystem



Clients Miners
All users of Cloud Storage Existing crypto miners
Consumers with data Cloud storage companies
Web App Companies & Developers Big data companies
Orgs storing or serving lots of data Data warehouses
(science, big data companies, Individuals with spare storage
video, GLAM, etc.) NAS owners
Blockchain Apps ISPs
… …

Partners
Storage hardware manufacturers
NAS & Server manufacturers
ISPs and interconnects
Data Centers
Protocol Labs
Developers
Investors
…

Filecoin is for clients Filecoin is for miners Filecoin is for partners,

Filecoin offers many significant Miners are the core service providers vendors, and investors
advantages over today’s storage of Filecoin, and define the network. Filecoin network growth will yield
options: Significantly lower costs. Miners will be diverse; lots of people opportunity for the whole storage
End-to-end encryption at rest. and orgs will come together from all ecosystem. Filecoin creates
Erasure coding for redundancy and backgrounds and corners of the additional demand for hard drives
self-healing. Resilience to failure world. They will both compete and and other storage hardware. Open
and attack. collaborate in the network. source Filecoin mining sotware will
come pre-installed on storage
Clients can tune storage strategies The Filecoin network is designed to de vices. ISPs, cloud storage
to suit their needs, creating custom reward participants at multiple providers, and data warehouses can
balance between redundancy, levels — from large scale data participate both as miners, and as
speed of retrieval, and cost. For centers to local entrepreneurs with vendors to other miners.
example, clients distributing large mining rigs that cover the last mile.
volumes of data to users around the Many companies and organizations
world (such as for media streaming) Miners who retain Filecoin tokens, will get more business or reduce
may choose to optimize for speed which may appreciate in value as their own costs thanks to Filecoin,
of retrieval. the network grows, are encouraged its miners, and its users.
to collaborate to make the network
as big and powerful as they can.



Filecoin is built with IPFS



They complement each other:

IPFS addresses and moves content, and
Filecoin is the missing incentive structure.

Learn more about IPFS:

The Next Internet Revolution Decentralized Web: IPFS & Filecoin

Juan Benet, TEDxSanFrancisco Juan Benet, Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup
https://youtu.be/2RCwZDRwk48 https://youtu.be/cU-n_m-snxQ
 5,000,000,000+ files on .
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a next-generation protocol to make the Web faster, safer, decentralized,
and permanent. Since the initial IPFS release in January 2015, it has gained strong traction in a variety of
industries and organizations. Today, IPFS is a foundational technology for many applications in the blockchain
industry. Over 5 billion files have been added to IPFS, spanning scientific data and papers, genetic research,
video distribution & streaming, 3D modeling, legal documents, entire blockchains and their transactions, video
games, and more.

IPFS and Filecoin are complementary protocols, and the adoption of the underlying IPFS protocol is a leading
indicator of market demand for a faster, safer, decentralized storage service.

500 GB Daily Data via HTTP-to-IPFS Gateway7 16 M Daily Requests via HTTP-to-IPFS Gateway8

375 GB 12 M

250 GB 8M

125 GB 4M

2016-07 2017-01 2017-06 2016-08 2017-01 2017-06

Example App: OpenBazaar

OpenBazaar is a fully peer-to-peer e-commerce

platform where anyone can buy or sell things
online, using Bitcoin or other crypto tokens.
OpenBazaar is a full-featured app on top of IPFS,
including: dynamic content, real-time encrypted
p2p chat, crypto token payments, and (soon) a
full mobile app.

 Some IPFS Users

Blockchain Apps

these and many more

Archiving and Distributing Precious Data

from these organizations and many more
 IPFS Open Source Community


The IPFS Project is a large community of open source contributors driven
to decentralize the web. The community is made up of thousands of
developers and users who have been working together for several years,
building valuable and widely used sotware tools.

The same seasoned core developers of IPFS are also leading the design
and development of Filecoin. The IPFS team has experience building
ambitious sotware projects and coordinating thriving developer
communities. A significant portion of the IPFS community plans to join
the Filecoin network, building tools and applications on this new, exciting
platform.

Join us!

1,600 IPFS GitHub Contributors

1,200

800

400

2015 2016 2017

36,000 IPFS GitHub Commits

27,000

18,000

9,000

2015 2016 2017

48,000 IPFS GitHub Community Comments

36,000

24,000

12,000

2015 2016 2017

 
 Large Scale Value Creation
The Filecoin Network is designed as a decentralized storage network powered by a blockchain. It will
create value in a number of ways, and the total impact of the network can be tremendous. Growth of
the network will drive demand for the token. The more value created by the Filecoin Network, the more
things people and organizations spend Filecoin on, and the greater the value and worth of the token.

Storage service use cases

Cloud Storage ($75B market size by 20219) 

Filecoin will create a powerful and dynamic cloud storage service.

Decentralization (new market)


Filecoin is decentralized and trustless. It helps avoid relying on
trusted parties, or vendors who keep your data hostage or try to
lock you in.

Algorithmic Storage Market (new market)


Filecoin drives storage prices downward by encouraging
competition from all providers, including newcomers bringing
latent storage online.

Algorithmic CDN ($23B market size by 202110)


Filecoin optimizes content delivery, as an incented, auto-scalable,
world-wide CDN.

File Contracts (new market)


Filecoin can run sophisticated smart contracts that operate on
large volumes of data, mediate valuable data transactions, and do
to the data economy what Ethereum is doing to finance.

Data Exchange

Users can sell data on the network, facilitating data exchanges
and markets.

Humanity’s Data

Filecoin will store treasure troves of critically important public
data, such as encyclopedias, open access scientific papers,
creative commons data sets, historical documents, and literature.

Standard blockchain use cases


Market cap of Bitcoin: $43B11, Ethereum: $26B12

Payments 

Like any other blockchain, Filecoin tokens can be transferred
between users.

Time-stamping

With the ability to store large amounts of data for long periods of
time, Filecoin will be the ultimate time-stamping service.

Store of value

Filecoin can be a decentralized, free store of value, backed by
something of real utility: a cloud storage service.



The Filecoin Token

What is the filecoin token?

The filecoin token is the native crypto token of the
Value created by the Filecoin network, similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Filecoin Network Filecoin is used to pay for storage, retrieval, and
transactions in the network.

Monetary Policy
Filecoin Token

• Limited Supply, with total set by the token sale.
Market Cap

• Minting by block reward as in Bitcoin.
• Genesis allocation to fund creation,
development, deployment, and reward creators.
• Backed by useful service: Demand for the storage
service drives demand for the token.

Filecoin price and the cost of spacetime

Filecoin will be 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 pressure.
 

Filecoin Token Allocations
The Filecoin Token will be distributed to the major participating groups in the Filecoin Network:
Miners, Protocol Labs, Investors, and the Filecoin Foundation. These groups are critical to the
creation, development, growth, and maintenance of the network. This allocation is written into the
protocol itself and the Filecoin blockchain’s Genesis block. Allocations are vested for many years.

Filecoin Token Supply

• 70% to Filecoin Miners (Mining block reward)


Protocol Labs For providing data storage service, maintaining the
15% blockchain, distributing data, running contracts, and more.

• 15% to Protocol Labs (Genesis)


Investors For research, engineering, deployment, business
10% development, marketing, distribution, and more.
Foundation • 10% to Investors (Genesis)

5% For funding network development, business development,
Miners partnerships, support, and more.
70%
• 5% to Filecoin Foundation (Genesis)

For long-term network governance, partner support,
academic grants, public works, community building, etc.

Token Release Schedule

• Filecoin Miners: Asymptotic vesting, similar to Bitcoin

• Protocol Labs: Linear vesting, 6 years
• Foundation: Linear vesting, 6 years
• Investors: Linear vesting, per block

(a more detailed page with the numeric values and an

interactive version on the web will be released soon)
Protocol Labs
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.

Team and Community

The Protocol Labs core team holds deep expertise in
distributed systems, cryptography, networks, blockchains,
security, fintech, economics, sotware engineering, and
open source. The team’s experience includes the top CS
universities, top tech and finance companies, and top
systems and blockchain projects.

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. We
expect to use RFPs with rewards and other systems to
organize large scale contributions.
 Appendix

1. “More data will be created in 2017 than the previous 5,000 years of humanity” via App Developer Magazine. https://
appdevelopermagazine.com/4773/2016/12/23/more-data-will-be-created-in-2017-than-the-previous-5,000-years-of-
humanity. Retrieved July 12, 2017

2. Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2015-2020. http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/

collateral/service-provider/global-cloud-index-gci/white-paper-c11-738085.pdf. Retrieved July 12, 2017
3. “Bitcoin is 100 times more powerful than Google” via Cryptocoin News. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-100-
times-powerful-google. Retrieved July 12, 2017

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