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Protocol Labs

Software company

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated November 27, 2025
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Protocol Labs is an open-source software research and development company, founded in 2014. It is best known for creating the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer decentralized web protocol, and Filecoin, a decentralized file storage network.

01History

Juan Benet founded Protocol Labs in May 2014. Early work on open-source tools to simplify management, indexing, and conversion of large data sets led to the creation of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer protocol for distributed files and offline applications. To support the project and spur adoption, they developed a Filecoin protocol and token for decentralized file storage, to let users rent out unused disk space.

02Projects

IPFS was released in January 2015, and Filecoin launched in 2017. Other projects developed by Protocol Labs include libp2p, a network stack for peer-to-peer apps and systems, which is used as the networking layer for IPFS; IPLD, a data model for interoperable protocols.

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Protocol Labs”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Related topics

InterPlanetary File System

The InterPlanetary File System is a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for sharing data using a distributed hash table to store provider information. By using content addressing, IPFS uniquely identifies each file in a global namespace that connects IPFS hosts, creating a distributed system of file storage and sharing.

Filecoin

Filecoin is a cryptocurrency intended to be a blockchain-based cooperative digital storage and data retrieval method. It was developed by Protocol Labs and shares some ideas from InterPlanetary File System allowing users to rent unused hard drive space.