Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward 

Purpose and Vision

Protocol Labs is an innovation network that connects over 600 tech startups, service providers, investment funds, accelerators, foundations, and other organizations developing breakthrough technologies and products in the frontiers of computing: web3, AI, AR, VR, BCI, hardware, and more.

Organizations collaborate across the network to solve common problems, share knowledge and resources, and accelerate the R&D process for a wide range of technological fields.

Protocol Lab week

Collaborations

We work with a community of people and organizations building a better future through technology.

Timeline of Work

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

Timeline Image
  • 2013

    • August

      IPFS and Filecoin — new protocols to decentralize the web and cloud storage — start to develop as ideas and prototypes.

  • 2014

  • 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

  • 2017

  • 2018

  • 2019

  • 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!

    • July

      Protocol Labs begins transition to a decentralized network, forming independent teams that collaborate openly.

    • 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.

    • September

      Inaugural FIL VC hosted in Singapore, with 26 teams and 300+ investors participating

    • 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.

    • July

      Builders Funnel and PL Ventures continue to scale, with [X] teams receiving investment and support from the PL Network.

    • September

      PL VS (PL Venture Studio) introduced. Additional Protocol Labs teams launched as independent companies, including Expanso, Lurk, Funding the Commons, and Solaris.

Get Involved

Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing, to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 600 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations. Their work spans web3, AI, AR, VR, BCI, hardware, and more.

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