Filecoin

Filecoin is a peer-to-peer network that stores files, with built-in economic incentives and cryptography to ensure files are stored reliably over time.

Filecoin is built on top of the same software powering IPFS(opens in a new tab) protocol, which is a peer-to-peer distributed storage network that leverages content addressing(opens in a new tab) to allow permanent references to the data, and avoids relying on specific devices or cloud servers for addressing the content. Filecoin is different from IPFS because it has an incentive layer on top to incentivize contents to be reliably stored and accessed.

In order for your Web3 application to interact with Filecoin — either by reading blockchain data or sending transactions to the network — it must connect to a Filecoin node. Developers interact with the blockchain using the methods provided by the API.

The API interaction follows the JSON-RPC(opens in a new tab) which is a stateless, light-weight remote procedure call (RPC) protocol. It defines several data structures and the rules around their processing. It is transport agnostic in that the concepts can be used within the same process, over sockets, over HTTP, or in other message-passing environments. It uses JSON (RFC 4627) as data format.