This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs and the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System.

Juan is also the creator of Filecoin, a storage network incentivized by crypto. Both of Juan’s ventures are hugely ambitious as they are in direct competition with the basic rails of the internet, with protocols such as HTTP and data giants like AWS. We begin our conversation with Juan explaining what led him to start IPFS and Filecoin.

Juan points out that all of the layers of the internet that run below the application layer, rely on trust. He believes that the promise of web3 is to be able to upgrade the whole stack with trust-minimized public verifiability primitives.

One of the key innovations of IPFS is in data addressing, which increases the efficiency of data fetching. But there’s more to IPFS than just this, and we talk about some of the other features of IPFS.

Juan says universities would be a good next step to expand the user base of Filecoin since they deal with large amounts of data and run intensive computations. We go on to discuss Filecoin's plans to encourage the adoption of its technology beyond web3 users.

Thanking our podcast sponsors:

Built by the team behind Avalanche, Core is an all-in-one command center for Web3 supporting Avalanche, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, a rich ecosystem of dApps, Bitcoin & Ethereum bridges, NFTs, Subnets, and more. Visit core.app to download now.
Minima is a new mobile-native layer 1 blockchain. Join over 400,000 node runners on Minima's Incentive Program, to start earning $MINIMA every day until Mainnet launch. Get started at minima.global/get-involved
Railway is the first DeFi wallet to integrate the powerful RAILGUN privacy system built using zero-knowledge cryptography and available on Ethereum, BSC, and Polygon.

Arkady Ostrovsky on The Invention of Russia | Antidote 2017