Breakout Startups #26- Protocol Labs

The Startup building the Filesystem for the Decentralized Internet

Jan 10, 2020

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In the 26th Edition of Breakout Startups, we are covering Protocol Labs, the company building Infrastructure for a Decentralized Internet.

Product(s)

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a new protocol to decentralize the web. IPFS enables the creation of completely decentralized and distributed applications, using content addressing and digital signatures. IPFS makes the web faster, safer, and more open.
Filecoin is a cryptocurrency-powered storage network. Miners earn Filecoin by providing open hard-drive space to the network, while users spend Filecoin to store their files encrypted in the decentralized network.
libp2p is a modular networking stack. libp2p brings together a variety of transports and peer-to-peer protocols, making it easy for developers to build large, robust p2p networks.
IPLD is the data model for the Decentralized Web. It connects all data through cryptographic hashes, and makes it easy to traverse and link to.
The Multiformats Project is a collection of protocols to future-proof systems, today. Self-describing formats make systems interoperable and upgradable.
CoinList is a protocol token fundraising platform. AngelList meets Kickstarter meets Protocol Tokens.
SAFT is a legal framework for protocol token fundraising.

Team

Juan Benet- Founder & CEO, Protocol Labs

Jeremy Johnson- Software Engineer, Protocol Labs

Friedel Ziegelmayer- Senior Software Engineer, Protocol Labs

Nicola Greco- Research Scientist, Protocol Labs

Along with this, Protocol Labs’ projects have a growing number of contributors in the Open Source Community. You can become a Contributor here 👇

Protocol Labs
Protocol Labs is a research, development, and deployment institution for improving Internet technology.protocol.ai

Funding

Protocol Labs is backed by marquee institutional investors such as Y Combinator, USV, Winklevoss Capital, etc & angel investors such as Naval Ravikant, Fred Ehrsam & others.

Protocol Labs has raised a total of $3.1M in funding over 3 rounds. The company was also a part of Y Combinator in the Summer 2014 Batch.
Not just this, Filecoin from Protocol Labs, raised $257M in an ICO in 2017.
Very recently, CoinList, one of the company’s projects, made in collaboration with AngelList, raised a $10M round backed by Polychain Capital & Jack Dorsey, Founder & CEO of Twitter & several others.

Protocol Labs and Decentralization Ecosystem Landscape

2020 is going to be a pivotal year of Protocol Labs and the ecosystem. The company launched the first phase of its test net for its much-awaited Filecoin Project on December 11 in 2019, as scheduled.

Filecoin is essentially building AWS for the Decentralized Internet. The product enables you to rent out spare storage on your computer to people or companies that need it. The company’s founder, Juan Benet describes it as, “Airbnb for Storage”.

According to the timelines announced, the Filecoin main net is scheduled to go live in Q2 2020.

Test Net Phase 1: December 11, 2019 — January 17, 2020
Test Net Phase 2: January 20 — March 20, 2020
Main Net Launch Window: March 23 — April 24, 2020

You can see the Public Roadmap Document here

Along with this, IPFS is one of the most talked-about projects in the space.

The project attempts to address the deficiencies of the client-server model and HTTP web through a novel p2p file-sharing system enabling high throughput, low latency, data distribution in a decentralized and secure manner.

Below are a few interesting projects being built on IPFS:

Akasha, a Next-Generation social network
Balance3, a triple-entry accounting platform
BlockFreight, an open network for global freight
Digix, a platform for tokenizing physical gold
Infura, an infrastructure provider for DApps
Livepeer, a decentralized live-video streaming platform
Origin, a peer-to-peer marketplace for the sharing economy
uPort, a self-sovereign identity system

The company also recently announced a partnership with the Ethereum Foundation to work on the Verifiable Delay Function(VDF), a new cryptographic primitive that can protect systems relying on the generation of (Pseudo) random values from attacks.

You can find more details about it below 👇

VDF Research
2019- Mahmoody, Smith, Wu A Note on the (Im)possibility of Verifiable Delay Functions in the Random Oracle Model 2019…vdfresearch.org

Along with this, 2020 will finally see the main net launch of protocols such as Dfinity, Polkadot have a public launch. This will see competition in the developer ecosystem where Ethereum clearly is leading and Blockstack having some traction.

Balaji Srinivasan, Ex-CTO of Coinbase, says,

The next decade will be the decade of decentralization. All the technologies the industry is building now — from zero knowledge and defi to new consensus algorithms and scaling technologies — will be put to work to decentralize one major service at a time. Financial services, messaging, and social media are the initial targets. As Twitter and Craigslist are relatively low bandwidth, they may be some of the first targets for decentralization.

We are already seeing some activity in line with this especially from Twitter which recently, announced that it’ll be funding a small team of open source architects, developers & designers to create a Decentralized Protocol for Social Media.

jack 🌍🌏🌎 @jack

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

This will be a huge advancement for the Blockchain Community if a company as big as Twitter shifts to a decentralized platform.

Companies such as Protocol Labs, Blockstack, Consensys building protocols for the Web 3.0 will be at the forefront of this technological change in the 2030s.