Early Days of Ethereum

Juan Benet is the creator of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Filecoin, and the founder of Protocol Labs. He was connected to the Ethereum project from very early on.

Early Connection to Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood stayed with Juan Benet in the San Francisco Bay Area in early 2014, during a period when the Ethereum founders were traveling and building out the project.

In Gavin Wood's October 2014 ÐΞV update, he described plans for deeper collaboration:

"In the future we hope to expand our operations there, particularly over January and February when Vitalik and I will be staying there, we in particular look forward to spending some time discussing the future of data sharing and online publication with Juan of IPFS and are optimistic about the possibility of finding some synergy between our projects."

IPFS and the Decentralized Web

Juan created IPFS, a peer-to-peer protocol for content-addressed file sharing using a distributed hash table. The initial release came in February 2015. IPFS and Ethereum would go on to become complementary pillars of the decentralized web — Ethereum providing decentralized computation and IPFS providing decentralized storage. Many Ethereum-based applications would later use IPFS for storing data off-chain.

Juan also created Filecoin, a decentralized storage network built on top of IPFS that uses blockchain-based incentives to ensure reliable file storage.