Filecoin

Filecoin is a decentralised storage network created by Protocol Labs (the team behind IPFS) and founded by Juan Benet, with mainnet launching in 2020. It allows anyone with spare hard drive space to rent it out to the network and earn FIL tokens, while users pay FIL to store files in a distributed, censorship-resistant way. Storage providers must cryptographically prove they are continuously storing files correctly using Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime — failing these proofs results in penalties to their staked FIL. Filecoin is widely used for archiving NFT metadata, scientific datasets, and open-source software, and has become a key infrastructure layer for the decentralised web.