Filecoin's Juan Benet on Upgrading the Heart of The Internet with Blockchains

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 de