About | Protocol Labs
Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward
Purpose and Vision
Protocol Labs is an innovation network that connects over 600 tech startups, service providers, investment funds, accelerators, foundations, and other organizations developing breakthrough technologies and products in the frontiers of computing: web3, AI, AR, VR, BCI, hardware, and more.
Organizations collaborate across the network to solve common problems, share knowledge and resources, and accelerate the R&D process for a wide range of technological fields.
Collaborations
We work with a community of people and organizations building a better future through technology.
Timeline of Work
Big things have small beginnings. Here is a slice of our story.
- August IPFS and Filecoin — new protocols to decentralize the web and cloud storage — start to develop as ideas and prototypes.
- May Protocol Labs (PL) founded by Juan Benet to improve the internet and computing. PL is part of the YCombinator S14 program.
- July Initial IPFS and Filecoin papers released. IPFS Community forms. go-ipfs and js-ipfs in development. Early IPFS and PL contributors join.
- September PL raises funding from prominent technology investors.
- February go-ipfs alpha is released, and development and growth in the open begins.
- Q3 IPFS gains usage in the Ethereum community, and among other blockchain networks.
- March Protocol Labs raises funding from BlueYard ( blog), USV ( blog), and other prominent investors.
- April go-ipfs 0.4.0 is released, with a large set of improvements.
- June libp2p, Multiformats, and IPLD are split out from IPFS, ahead of the first Decentralized Web Summit with internet pioneers.
- Q1 PL redesigns the Filecoin protocol, culminating in the invention of Proofs-of-Replication and other cryptography results.
- PL creates initial version of CoinList with AngelList to run Filecoin and other token sales.
- July PL Filecoin v2 paper is released.
- Q3 PL raises funding through the Filecoin Token Sale, raising $205.8M total.
- October CoinList launches as an independent company, spun out from Protocol Labs and AngelList.
- The SAFT Project launches as a collaboration between Protocol Labs, Cooley, and other token creators, legal experts, and investors.
- April Protocol Labs Research and RFP Grant Program debut.
- September PL hosts LabDay 2018, a day-long event dedicated to contributors and collaborators in the Protocol Labs ecosystem.
- January First ProtoSchool workshop held in Denver, CO.
- February PL introduces the Permissive License Stack, an open-source approach to intellectual property.
- Filecoin code is opened to the community and first devnets launched.
- December Filecoin Testnet launches, and grows to 5 PB of proved storage in the following months.
- April IPFS 0.5.0 is released.
- May Testground, a platform for testing, benchmarking, and simulating distributed and p2p systems at scale, launches.
- August The League of Entropy, a partnership between Protocol Labs, Cloudflare, the Ethereum Foundation, and others, launches drand, the Internet’s first production-grade, publicly verifiable randomness beacon.
- October Filecoin mainnet launches, surpassing 1 EiB of storage capacity within its first month.
- April nft.storage launches, providing off-chain storage of NFT metadata and assets in a free, simple service. More than 40M NFTs stored on IPFS & Filecoin within the first year!
- July Protocol Labs begins transition to a decentralized network, forming independent teams that collaborate openly.
- September Filecoin and IPFS builders funnel continues to grow, with over 10,000+ developers engaged YTD through hackathons and grants.
- October The Filecoin network continues to grow, with over 3,300 storage providers and over 12EB of capacity, making Filecoin the largest aggregation of data storage in the history of the world.
- November The inaugural Funding The Commons was held, creating a forum for people making shared goods faster and more robustly via user-friendly mechanisms and robust experiments.
- February PLN Launchpad, a full-time onboarding program for new network members, kicks off its first cohort. It ends 2022 with the successful completion of eight cohorts.
- September Inaugural FIL VC hosted in Singapore, with 26 teams and 300+ investors participating
- October LabWeek22, our first-ever decentralized conference, brought together over 150 PLN teams, with 1,000+ attendees and 100+ speakers at 38 events in Lisbon.
- November Protocol Labs and Filecoin Foundation announce an alliance ( Decentralized Storage Alliance) with AMD, Seagate and EY, to help more companies make the transition from Web2 to Web3.
- December Saturn, a Web3 CDN in Filecoin’s retrieval market, launches version 1.
- January Bacalhau Python SDK ships, offering client-side logic, enabling builders to fully interact with Bacalhau with a user-friendly, Pythonic interface.
- March Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) is live on mainnet! The Filecoin blockchain now supports smart contracts and user programmability via the FVM, unlocking the enormous potential of an open data economy.
- September PLVS (PL Venture Studio) introduced. Additional Protocol Labs teams launched as independent companies, including Expanso, Lurk, Funding the Commons, and Solaris.
- April The World App surpasses 10 million users, advancing global biometric identity and proof-of-personhood in decentralized applications.
- May PLVS graduates its second cohort, featuring Akave, Storacha, Randamu, and other startups advancing decentralized technologies and data solutions.
- July Protocol Labs completes its transition to a decentralized innovation network.
- September PL Dev Guild kicks off its first cohort, empowering open-source contributors to build impactful projects across the network.
- December Bluesky – a new, open social network – passes 25 million users.
- February BitRobot Network launches its decentralized platform for developing embodied AI through interoperable subnets.
- April Prime Intellect releases INTELLECT-2, the first fully permissionless, decentralized 32B-parameter RL training run open to anyone with compute.
Get Involved
Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations. Their work spans web3, AI, AR, VR, BCI, hardware, and more.