Huobi collaborates with Filecoin to launch incubation centre

The collaboration will focus on incubation, investment and community development

Huobi announced yesterday that they would be collaborating with Filecoin to launch the Huobi-Filecoin Incubation Center. Protocol labs will act as technical advisor to the investment fund, which will see $10 million dedicated to supporting the Filecoin ecosystem.

The focus of the new centre will be incubation, investment and community development. Firstly, incubation will involve Huobi leveraging their expertise in exchange solutions and Asian markets to collaborate with existing Filecoin accelerators and incubators. Secondly, Huobi will provide investment to promising projects on the Filecoin ecosystem, with technical guidance and support from Protocol Labs. Thirdly, Huobi and Protocol Labs will further community development by creating more cross-border connections between developers, miners, users and token holders through hosting global annual summits and quarterly meet-ups.

Chief Investment Officer of Huobi, Sharlyn Wu, commented “Decentralized storage is a great experiment that combines cloud storage with the decentralized mechanism of blockchain. We believe that Filecoin would be the infrastructure for the next generation of internet. In this new age of information, we need to develop new ways to protect, store, and exchange our data, which could be crucial for how society and the world could be defined and developed.”

Wu is head of Huobi’s decentralised business department and will supervise the new incubation centre. Before joining Huobi as CIO, she was responsible for China Merchant Bank International’s strategy and investment in blockchain.

Data is fast becoming the world’s most valuable asset and Huobi believe Filecoin and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) will herald a new age of the internet by creating a more accessible, equal and safe system for its storage and distribution. Indeed, Filecoin has seen a surge of interest since its mainnet launch on 15 October.

It currently has more than 700 miners providing storage solutions, over 4,800 developers supporting the project on GitHub, more than 100 organisations building on the mainnet and over 200 new projects entering the ecosystem through accelerators and hackathons. The amount of storage on the network has also risen by over 60% since the launch to more than one Exabyte — enough space to store 4,000 versions of Wikipedia.

Founder of Protocol Labs and Filecoin, Juan Benet, added “Right now the internet is in the middle of a revolution, and, with the launch of Filecoin, it is beginning the transition back to its decentralized roots so we can all work together to safeguard this valuable resource for the world … Programs like the Huobi Filecoin Incubation Center will play important roles in supporting the community in their quest for a better web and a brighter future”