About

Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward

Purpose and Vision

Protocol Labs is an open-source research, development, and deployment laboratory. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and many more. We aim to make human existence orders of magnitude better through technology.

We are a fully distributed company. Our team of more than 100 members works remotely and in the open to improve the internet — humanity’s most important technology — as we explore new advances in computing and related fields.

Timeline of Work

Big things have small beginnings. Here is a slice of our story.

2013
- August
  
  IPFS and Filecoin — new protocols to decentralize the web and cloud storage — start to develop as ideas and prototypes.
2014
- May
  
  Protocol Labs (PL) founded by Juan Benet to improve the internet and computing. PL is part of the YCombinator S14 program.
- July
  
  Initial IPFS and Filecoin papers released. IPFS Community forms. go-ipfs and js-ipfs in development. Early IPFS and PL contributors join.
- September
  
  PL raises funding from prominent technology investors.
2015
- February
  
  go-ipfs alpha is released, and development and growth in the open begins.
- Q3
  
  IPFS gains usage in the Ethereum community, and among other blockchain networks.
2016
- March
  
  Protocol Labs raises funding from BlueYard (blog), USV (blog), and other prominent investors.
- April
  
  go-ipfs 0.4.0 is released, with a large set of improvements.
- June
  
  libp2p, Multiformats, and IPLD are split out from IPFS, ahead of the first Decentralized Web Summit with internet pioneers.
2017
- Q1
  
  PL redesigns the Filecoin protocol, culminating in the invention of Proofs-of-Replication and other cryptography results.
- PL creates initial version of CoinList with AngelList to run Filecoin and other token sales.
- July
  
  PL Filecoin v2 paper is released.
- Q3
  
  PL raises funding through the Filecoin Token Sale, raising $205.8M total.
- October
  
  CoinList launches as an independent company, spun out from Protocol Labs and AngelList.
- The SAFT Project launches as a collaboration between Protocol Labs, Cooley, and other token creators, legal experts, and investors.
2018
- January
  
  SourceCred project starts.
- April
  
  Protocol Labs Research and RFP Grant Program debut.
- September
  
  PL hosts LabDay 2018, a day-long event dedicated to contributors and collaborators in the Protocol Labs ecosystem.
2019
- January
  
  First ProtoSchool workshop held in Denver, CO.
- February
  
  PL introduces the Permissive License Stack, an open-source approach to intellectual property.
- Filecoin code is opened to the community and first devnets launched.
- December
  
  Filecoin Testnet launches, and grows to 5 PB of proved storage in the following months.
2020
- April
  
  IPFS 0.5.0 is released.
- May
  
  Testground, a platform for testing, benchmarking, and simulating distributed and p2p systems at scale, launches.
- August
  
  The League of Entropy, a partnership between Protocol Labs, Cloudflare, the Ethereum Foundation, and others, launches drand, the Internet’s first production-grade, publicly verifiable randomness beacon.
- October
  
  Filecoin mainnet launches, surpassing 1 EiB of storage capacity within its first month.
2021
- April
  
  nft.storage launches, providing off-chain storage of NFT metadata and assets in a free, simple service. More than 40M NFTs stored on IPFS & Filecoin within the first year!
- September
  
  Filecoin and IPFS builders funnel continues to grow, with over 10,000+ developers engaged YTD through hackathons and grants.
- October
  
  The Filecoin network continues to grow, with over 3,300 storage providers and over 12EB of capacity, making Filecoin the largest aggregation of data storage in the history of the world.
- November
  
  The inaugural Funding The Commons was held, creating a forum for people making shared goods faster and more robustly via user-friendly mechanisms and robust experiments.
2022
- February
  
  PLN Launchpad, a full-time onboarding program for new network members, kicks off its first cohort. It ends 2022 with the successful completion of eight cohorts.
- October
  
  LabWeek22, our first-ever decentralized conference, brought together over 150 PLN teams, with 1,000+ attendees and 100+ speakers at 38 events in Lisbon.
- November
  
  Protocol Labs and Filecoin Foundation announce an alliance (Decentralized Storage Alliance) with AMD, Seagate and EY, to help more companies make the transition from Web2 to Web3.
- December
  
  Saturn, a Web3 CDN in Filecoin’s retrieval market, launches version 1.
2023
- January
  
  Bacalhau Python SDK ships, offering client-side logic, enabling builders to fully interact with Bacalhau with a user-friendly, Pythonic interface.
- March
  
  Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) is live on mainnet! The Filecoin blockchain now supports smart contracts and user programmability via the FVM, unlocking the enormous potential of an open data economy.