From 0 to 1, what did IPFS go through?

"Vitalik, Gavin Wood, Juan, this is the most luxurious roundtable meeting I have ever seen!"

In fact, in addition to Filecoin and IPFS, Juan is also a fruitful serial entrepreneur. Today, let’s take a brief look at this “low-key” founder of a public chain project.

01
First pot of gold

Juan Benet was born in March 1988 in a city in south-central Mexico.

In 2006, Juan was admitted to Stanford University, one of the top three universities in the United States, with excellent grades to study computer science. From the first year of enrollment, he interned in companies such as Anticancer, Verve Wireless, and Cooliris, which laid a certain foundation for his later entrepreneurship.

In 2010, after graduating from college, Juan chose to stay at Stanford University to pursue a master's degree in computer science. At the same time, he founded the game company Loki Studios with several other Stanford University computer science graduates and served as CTO. Loki Studios focuses on the development of iOS games based on location information. Its flagship product is called Geomon. Users can have different gaming experiences in different places, and any changes in the user's surroundings (such as weather, temperature, season, geographic information, etc.) can affect the game itself. This is somewhat similar to the popular Pokemon Go game 4 years later.

At the end of 2011, Juan resigned as CTO of Loki Studios, and Loki Studios was acquired by Yahoo in May 2013.

In 2012, Juan successfully graduated from Stanford University. Immediately afterwards, he founded Athena, a startup company, with the skills and resources he had accumulated during his time at school, and once again plunged into the wave of entrepreneurship. Athena's goal is to map all kinds of human knowledge into a learning roadmap, so that learners can quickly know what knowledge points they need to master when learning, thereby accelerating the learning process.

Since Athena did not develop smoothly, Juan chose to leave after one year. During this period, Juan first came into contact with blockchain technology and was deeply fascinated by it, which formed an indissoluble bond for his subsequent blockchain entrepreneurship.

02
Prolific Protocol Labs

In May 2014 , Juan and several like-minded partners founded Protocol Labs . According to the official introduction, Protocol Labs is a network protocol research, development and deployment laboratory, currently focusing on how to store, locate and transmit information.

In the summer of 2014 , Protocol Labs received funding from YC (Y Combinator), the top startup incubator in Silicon Valley. With the huge investment from YC, Protocol Labs accelerated its development process, and many projects and protocols came out one after another:

1. IPFS

In 2015, Protocol Labs launched IPFS (The InterPlanetary File System). IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that uses decentralized storage technology to divide files into multiple fragments and store them on different nodes of the IPFS network. When needed, the IPFS network will automatically "join" and restore the files.

The goal of IPFS is to create a more open, fast, and secure Internet, and say goodbye to the common lags and 404 errors of the traditional HTTP protocol. It should be noted that IPFS is not a blockchain, nor a project, but an underlying network transmission protocol.

2. Libp2p

Libp2p is a modular network stack that makes it easier for developers to build large, robust peer-to-peer networks . At present, in addition to Filecoin launched by Protocol Labs itself, many public chains use the Libp2p protocol at the bottom layer, such as Polkadot's Substrate, EOS, Ethereum 2.0, etc.

3. IPLD

IPLD is one of the core components of IPFS and was later separated out by Protocol Labs.

IPLD can be simply understood as a structural parser that can unify various existing data structures into one format, facilitate data exchange and interoperability between different systems, and ultimately achieve content addressing - using cryptographic hashes to locate content.

4. Multiformats

Simply put, Multiformats is a collection of protocols that aims to create a future-proof system. It allows protocols to interoperate, maintain protocol flexibility, and remain scalable and upgradeable.

5. Testground

Testground is a tool for large-scale testing, simulation, and benchmarking of peer-to-peer and distributed systems.

6. SourceCred

SourceCred's goal is to create a decentralized protocol to evaluate people's contributions and receive corresponding value in return.

7. ProtoSchool

ProtoSchool is a community education project that teaches decentralized network protocols and tools through online tutorials and offline events.

8. Drand

Simply put, Drand mainly provides random number services.

9. Filecoin

Filecoin is a decentralized storage protocol that incentivizes miners to provide storage services through FIL token rewards. Filecoin can also be seen as the incentive layer of IPFS.

In addition to the above 9 projects/protocols listed on the Protocol Labs official website, Juan also collaborated with AngelList founder Naval Ravikant to co-found CoinList.

CoinList is a financing channel that provides initial token issuance for certified investors and high-quality blockchain projects. So far, CoinList has completed financing for 15 blockchain projects, including Filecoin, DFINITY , Algorand, Nervos, NEAR, etc., with a total of more than 20,000 participants and a financing scale of up to US$800 million.

03
Filecoin develops amidst stumbling blocks and rumors

Since the launch of the IPFS protocol in 2015, Juan and Protocol Labs wanted to create an incentive layer for IPFS to encourage users to provide storage services.

In 2017, Protocol Labs launched a blockchain project called Filecoin. It started private placement in July 2017 and raised $52 million. In August, the ICO raised $205 million, breaking the record for blockchain projects at the time. The investment institutions involved in Filecoin financing are quite impressive, including DCG Group (Grayscale's parent company) , Y Combinator, A16Z, Winklevoss Capital, Sequoia Capital, etc.

However, despite the endorsement of many top investment institutions, the progress of the Filecoin project has been unsatisfactory. The launch time of the mainnet has been postponed again and again, so much so that some people ridiculed it as the "king of pigeons."

At the end of last year, the Filecoin team adjusted the mining algorithm. Prior to that, mining machine manufacturers had sold millions of Filecoin mining machines. The adjustment of the mining algorithm caused some miners who had stockpiled mining machines early on to suffer heavy losses and complain.

On the eve of the launch of the Filecoin mainnet this year, the official FIL pre-staking rules were too strict, which once again attracted complaints and protests from miners. After a period of bargaining, Filecoin officials finally compromised.

On October 15, the Filecoin mainnet was finally launched, and major trading platforms rushed to list FIL, with the highest price being hyped up to over $200. However, to the surprise of many people, on the first day of the mainnet launch, the Filecoin official team actually transferred a large amount of FIL to the trading platform for market making to "maintain the stability of the currency price in the early stage."

In his speech, Juan said:

The focus of Filecoin is to store data for customers. If you only want short-term profits but don’t want to provide long-term value, you should exit now.

Despite the bumps and bruises along the way and the constant rumors, the Filecoin network has performed well in the past month since the mainnet went online: the effective computing power of the entire network has reached 1.16EiB, and the number of active miners has reached 754. (Data as of the screenshot time below)

Of course, the current Filecoin still has a long way to go before it can truly store real data on the To B and To C ends .

04
Conclusion

The Protocol Labs under Juan's leadership has achieved fruitful results, but has always adhered to the spirit of open source, making all project codes open source and contributing to other blockchain projects.

In 2018, Juan was named one of Fortune magazine’s “40 Under 40”, a testament to the traditional media’s recognition of the achievements of this low-key serial entrepreneur.

05
Interstellar World Observation

On October 15, the Filecoin network successfully switched from the test network to the main network at blockchain height 148888; from a broader perspective, Filecoin has finally achieved a leap from 0 to 1 after several years of polishing from Demo to project implementation, and also made the Web3.0 infrastructure framework clearer.

Among the many projects of Protocol Labs, Filecoin is of particular importance in ecology. It is not an exaggeration to regard it as the engine of IPFS protocol commercialization and data privatization. However, Filecoin has just been launched and is still shaky. It needs the community to work together to solve the series of problems at hand.

The ecological construction of the IPFS protocol is a pristine continent. Currently, the Protocol Lab is working with Langhash and Huobi Labs to establish special funds to incubate IPFS ecological applications. We look forward to the continued prosperity of the IPFS & Filecoin ecological construction in 2021.

——End——