Filecoin

Filecoin is a storage market built on top of IPFS content addressing. Storage miners pledge disk capacity, prove they still hold agreed data on a schedule, and earn FIL for honest service. Clients negotiate deals with miners instead of renting opaque cloud buckets.

Retrieval miners (or hybrid nodes) optimize for bandwidth and low-latency fetches, earning separate fees when users pull hot content. Cold archives may sit on storage miners with slower retrieval — builders should test end-to-end latency for their use case, not just deal price per terabyte.

Filecoin Plus allocates subsidized deal capacity to verified useful data, lowering effective storage cost for public goods. Enterprise adopters often use Lotus, Estuary, or hosted APIs rather than running miners themselves. The economic layer turns 'please keep my CID online' into a measurable, enforceable agreement.