Filecoin cryptographically verifies that a unique encoding of your data exists in physical storage in the world... over time.
Filecoin Proofs of Storage are a new foundation for a decentralized network with built-in incentives that drives an internet-wide market for storing and retrieving data.
Learn More What Sets us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System
Filecoin uses economic incentives to create a verifiable storage market.
An open marketplace of storage nodes incentivizes long-term distributed storage at competitive prices. Miners compete on factors like reliability as well as price.
Storage Miners earn FIL from storage deals, message transaction fees or block rewards. Retrieval Miners & Services earn FIL for data retrieval and serve as a CDN or caching layer.
Learn More Filecoin's Cryptoeconomic Constructions
Filecoin is built on top of IPFS, complementary protocols for storing and sharing data in the decentralized web.
Filecoin is the missing incentive layer for IPFS and verifies that your data is being stored, while maintaining the efficiency, authenticity and resiliency provided by IPFS.
They can also be used in conjunction with other blockchains.
Learn More IPFS & Filecoin - Docs
Network governance will involve future Filecoin Improvement Proposals to the protocol along with a community exploring developer tools, services & apps.
Programmable storage and user-defined smart contracts (aka actors in Filecoin) are roadmap, along with continued research into protocol improvements.
Filecoin is a core protocol for a storage market. Developers can build their own encryption, redundancy and miner reputation systems on top.
Learn More The Filecoin Project: Roadmap & Research
The Filecoin network is now live and fully functional.
The Filecoin network is permissionless and open for anyone to access. The codebase of the Filecoin Project is open-source for anyone to use or contribute to.
Storage miners can earn Filecoin by providing useful storage for clients. Storage clients can store and retrieve real data. Developers can begin building applications on top of APIs.
We welcome disclosures of security vulnerabilities and protocol issues. Please follow our security vulnerability reporting guide.
Filecoin Stats Dashboard View Filecoin network statistics and blocks
The foundational protocol layer is enabled by a p2p network of Filecoin nodes.
Node implementations include lotus (furthest along, in Go), fuhon (in C++) and forest (in Rust).
Like IPFS nodes, they communicate over a libp2p peer-to-peer network, use IPLD to authenticate data models and formats, and multiformats to future-proof upgradability.
Filecoin implementations The importance of multiple implementations
Interact with the network via cmd line or node API. Or try the Developer Tools in the next section.
To get started with a full node, install node software and follow the docs to connect to a devnet, testnet or Filecoin mainnet. Start storage mining, storing and retrieving data.
Learn more about lotus Filecoin's JSON RPC API.
Filecoin Community Slack Issues, help requests, questions and benchmarks can be shared in our Community Slack:
#fil-help for general questions, #fil-lotus for lotus topics
For async discussions please visit the Filecoin discussion forum.
A local or shared Devnet can simplify development & testing under different conditions before deploying to the live main network.
You can find resources to set up or join a Devnet on the community resources wiki. Options for accessing hosted endpoints are also available.
Find Devnet tools on the Community Resources Wiki A list of community projects to aid in installing, using & building on Filecoin
Filecoin is a core protocol for a verifiable storage market. Our ecosystem has additional tools to simplify building & end-user experience.
If you're familiar with other blockchains, there are wallets, authentication tools and JS APIs to help you get started, with more on the way.
Powergate by Textile is a convenient tool that has all of these + a storage market swiss army knife (including a deal agent and fast retrieval).
Know IPFS? Learn about more convenient tools like Pinning Services, up next.
Community Resources A list of community projects to aid in installing, using & building on Filecoin
Offer both options through a general Pinning API, making it seamless for dapp developers to back up from IPFS to Filecoin.
For those who want IPFS performance as well as Filecoin's incentives, but do not want to maintain IPFS & Filecoin nodes.
FPS infrastructure is the prototype for advanced retrieval miners in the Filecoin network. Several service providers are offering FPS services to beta testers like dapp integrators. Reach out to filecoin-collab for more info.
FPS one-sheet Filecoin-backed IPFS Pinning API
Wherever on the spectrum between fully decentralized to backed by hosted services, Filecoin offers apps long-term storage with the structural efficiency of IPFS.
Filecoin's range of ecosystem tools & services help you evolve your dapp ideas and harness the power of verified storage.
Leverage a robust global market where storage price is driven by supply and demand, not corporate departments, and data storage is cryptographically verified on the network.
Sample App Architectures Sample architectures for building Filecoin dapps
To learn about awesome projects built with Filecoin, visit the Filecoin Shipyard.
If you have an idea for something great, consider applying to the Filecoin Dev Grants program. New grants are awarded every quarter. Stay tuned for new RFPs.
Filecoin Shipyard Community launchpad to collaborate on research experiments, products, code libraries, and more.
