Glossary
Filecoin
A decentralized storage network and Layer-1 that pays miners to store and retrieve data on behalf of clients, with cryptographic proofs that the data is being kept.
Filecoin, launched in 2020 by Protocol Labs, is a market for decentralized storage. Clients pay miners to store data; miners periodically submit "proofs of spacetime" — cryptographic evidence that they still have the data — to earn the storage fee and block rewards.
The native FIL token settles storage deals and secures the chain. Filecoin complements IPFS: where IPFS handles content addressing and retrieval, Filecoin provides an economic guarantee that someone keeps the bytes available.