#15 - IPFS, CoinList, and the Filecoin ICO - Juan Benet and Dalton Caldwell

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Dalton Caldwell, who's a partner of Yc, and Juan Benet, who's the founder of Protocol Labs, a Yc company that's working on IPFS, Filecoin and Coinlist.
If you're just getting into cryptocurrency, I highly recommend listening to episode 244 of Tim Ferriss' podcast, which does a pretty good job of covering all the terms and explaining how they all connect to each other. And before we get started, I wanna let you know that this is a really long episode, so it's pretty much broken up into three parts. Part one starts right after this, and it's Juan's explanation of IPFS and Filecoin. Part two is our conversation with Dalton, and that starts around minute 11 And part three is Juan answering questions from Twitter, and that starts around one hour and 40 minutes in.

**Juan Benet** (0:42)
All right, here we go.

**Craig Cannon** (0:43)
Let's just start with a description of all the words we've been talking about. Yeah, IPFS, Protocol Labs, et cetera.

**Juan Benet** (0:49)
So, Protocol Labs is a research development and deployment lab for networks that I started to really build the IPFS project and build Filecoin and create a place where we could create the kinds of projects that could turn into something like IPFS or Filecoin or other things. I really wanted to build an organization that someone like Satoshi could have seen as a way to build a project through. It'd be like, oh yeah, instead of doing this on my own anonymously, I could go and build it in Protocol Labs. And it is born out of a personal frustration where when I was starting the IPFS project, I didn't have such an organization that I could go to and go and build a project there.
Really, I think the only option was either university or Google, and in the university case, it would have been killed in the publish-of-perish world where like, hey, this is way too ambitious, focus on this one little thing, and maybe publish that and move on to the next thing, and it would have not been an implementation project, similar to how the web could have never really been built as a grassroots project.
And then the flip side, I think this kind of tech is stuff that Google might be interested in funding from the perspective of Google funds a lot of protocols and funds a lot of research, but it also kind of runs counter to basic Google positions around control of data and how the internet, how information flows and all that kind of stuff. And it's like in direct opposition, so it's stuff that probably shouldn't have been funded or in direct control by Google. And it's the kind of stuff that has the potential to really rebalance power on the internet. And so I figured I would start an organization that's separate. And so Protocol Labs is really a group that is trying to create a number of these projects and protocols around things that we think are broken on the internet. The charge that we have for ourselves, the mission that we have is to go and improve and upgrade a whole bunch of the software and protocol machinery that we have running the internet both in low level actual internet part or the web and more user-facing pieces. And we have a very open-ended perspective of, hey, we just want to improve computing in general and improve the pipeline of going from research to a product that people use. It just happens that for now and for the next few years, we're super focused on how information moves around the internet, how to distribute it better, how to change and rebalance power associated with information, give people sovereignty of data, give people, and just make the internet more efficient, make it route around things like attacker and hostile censorship, make it so that information has more permanence, a whole bunch of questions around this. And the two projects there are, one of them is IPFS, the Interplanetary File System. It's used by a ton of organizations and both businesses and projects and blockchain networks and governments and so on. And it's used in a whole bunch of cases around, I think in a short way to describe IPFS is saying, hey, it's a large scale content addressed content distribution thing.
And it's a protocol, it's a peer-to-peer protocol for moving around anything, any kind of content, files, data, hypermedia, whatever, in a peer-to-peer way.
And with proper content addressing and cryptographic verification and all this kind of stuff, and a whole bunch of tooling around the guts of making all of that work, which is peer-to-peer networks and the ability to work across a whole bunch of different transports, and there's no end to the really important pieces of the peer-to-peer machinery that you have to build that the IP address project was really about. And that's used by a ton of people both in the blockchain space and outside.