The Huobi Group, in collaboration with Protocol Labs, has announced the launch of the Huobi Filecoin Incubation Center with a $10M USD fund dedicated to supporting the Filecoin ecosystem.

The center will focus on three main areas: incubation, investment, and community development. It will support promising Filecoin developers, promote Filecoin-related academic research, and foster ecosystem development. Both Huobi and Protocol Labs believe that IPFS and Filecoin will be the foundation of the next generation of internet, creating a safer, more equal, and accessible system to distribute and store data - our most valuable asset in the 21st century.

Miners have now onboarded more than 1.2 Exbibytes (EiB) of storage to the Filecoin network, since the mainnet launch on October 15th. This is enough to store 250 million 1080p movies or 4000 backups of Wikipedia. There are more than 100 organizations building on Filecoin’s mainnet, 200+ new projects entering the ecosystem through accelerators and hackathons, over 730 miners providing storage solutions and more than 4,800 developers contributing to the project on GitHub.

Seeing the Filecoin ecosystem’s enormous potential, Huobi believes that similar to decentralized finance, decentralized storage solutions such as Filecoin will lead a new wave of blockchain revolution and bring more innovation opportunities to developers. With Protocol Labs as the technical advisor to the investment fund, the incubation center will provide support for Filecoin developers and the community.

“Decentralized storage is a great experiment that combines cloud storage with the decentralized mechanism of blockchain. We believe that Filecoin would be the infrastructure for the next generation of internet. In this new age of information, we need to develop new ways to protect, store, and exchange our data, which could be crucial for how society and the world could be defined and developed. In the past, the world had no mature system to handle data at scale in a decentralized way. Decentralized storage in the blockchain world is also still in the 0 to 1 stage. Viable use cases, incentive mechanism designs, and the system’s robustness and effectiveness are yet to be tested. There are still many gaps to be filled in the Filecoin ecosystem, whether from theoretical research or technological development standpoint; we see that the entire ecosystem needs more resources and support,” said Huobi CIO Sharlyn Wu.

The launch of the Huobi Filecoin Incubation Center and the ecosystem fund mark an important collaboration between the Filecoin community and a digital asset services provider. The two together will promote academic research and technical development of Filecoin and foster a stronger Filecoin ecosystem globally,” Wu added.

To help develop Filecoin globally, the Huobi Filecoin Incubation Center and ecosystem fund will focus on the following key areas:

1. Incubation. Collaborate with existing Filecoin accelerators and incubators, providing additional courses leveraging Huobi’s advantages in exchange solutions and Asia community.
2. Investment. Huobi would provide funding to promising projects in the Filecoin ecosystem, with Protocol Labs providing technical guidance and support.
3. Community development. Huobi and Protocol Labs will co-host annual summits and quarterly meetups globally, creating more cross border connections and communications among developers, miners, users, and token holders.

The incubation center will be under the supervision of Sharlyn Wu, the head of Huobi’s decentralized business department. Sharlyn is currently the Chief Investment Officer of Huobi and was previously responsible for China Merchants Bank International’s strategy and investment in blockchain. This incubation center is the second of its kind following the Huobi DeFi Labs and will help Huobi Group conduct research, investment, incubation, and community building in the Filecoin ecosystem.