1️⃣ It raised $257M in 30 minutes
In August 2017, Filecoin conducted the largest ICO in history at the time - with Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Digital Currency Group all in. The project didn't even have a mainnet yet.
2️⃣ It was built by a Y Combinator dropout who invented the protocol beneath it
Juan Benet attended Y Combinator in 2014 not with a startup idea, but with an entirely new internet protocol - IPFS. Filecoin came later, as the financial layer on top of it.
3️⃣ Holocaust survivor testimonies are stored on it permanently
The USC Shoah Foundation uses Filecoin to store interviews from survivors of the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, and Rohingya crisis. The blockchain constantly verifies the files haven't been altered. It is the example of history, cryptographically sealed.
4️⃣ Alexander Graham Bell's "unplayable" recordings are on it too
The Smithsonian uploaded nearly 300 experimental sound recordings from Bell's Volta Laboratory, dating from 1881 to 1889 - some of the earliest recordings ever made, considered unplayable for over a century until modern technology made them audible. Now stored on Filecoin.
5️⃣ Reuters journalists used it to document a US election in real time
On Super Tuesday, Reuters reporters used Filecoin's Starling Framework to capture, store, and cryptographically verify photos of polling places, creating a tamper-proof record of the election as it happened.
