Filecoin provides a blockchain-based marketplace that aims to revolutionize the global storage economy. The Filecoin marketplace aims to deliver a new and secure way for anyone in the world to buy and sell storage.

Fundamentally, marketplaces are information processing systems that use competitive pricing to allocate resources. Filecoin aims to create the best global marketplace for storage by directly connecting storage clients and providers on a permissionless, decentralized marketplace where storage is commoditized. This distinguishes Filecoin from existing large-scale cloud storage providers.

Filecoin was founded on the idea that there is a more affordable and efficient way to store data than on traditional Web 2.0 platforms. As a blockchain-based marketplace, Filecoin is community-driven and decentralized. That means individual storage clients and storage miners compete for transactions based on price, reputation, reliability, retrievability, and latency. And Filecoin’s blockchain ensures that files are stored in a secure and publicly-verifiable way.

Filecoin’s storage marketplace takes advantage of the world’s underutilized storage assets. With Filecoin, people anywhere in the world can offer their unused storage space to anyone else. This creates a sharing economy that aims to unlock untold amounts of storage and drive economies of scale for pricing storage solutions.

Storage on the Filecoin network decouples hard drive space from many of the commonly bundled additional services provided by other cloud storage providers. The protocol enables buyers and sellers to trade in storage space directly. As a result, clients and miners are free to negotiate prices and features. Filecoin provides the secure network and token that clients and miners can use to enter storage contracts in a peer-to-peer fashion.