Over 500,000 Cultural Artifacts Now Stored on Filecoin 📚

Filecoin Foundation recently announced the addition of new cultural datasets to the Filecoin network from renowned organizations including The Smithsonian, Flickr Foundation, and MIT. With over 500,000 culturally significant digital artifacts now stored – ranging from academic research data and journalist archives to AI datasets and films on cultural history – the Filecoin community is leading the charge to preserve humanity’s most important information.

The Defiant

The Defiant, a leading crypto media outlet, is now safeguarding its entire archive – made up of thousands of articles – as well as future content on Filecoin. With storage facilitated by Akave, this move ensures The Defiant’s journalism remains immutable, verifiable, and accessible, protecting against link rot and content loss. Readers will soon see a “Preserved on Filecoin” marker on archived articles.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is working to upload nearly 300 digitized sound recordings from Alexander Graham Bell to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Filecoin. Experimental recordings from his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., dating from 1881 to 1889, are some of the earliest recordings ever made.

Flickr Foundation

Flickr Foundation is contributing the 1,000 most viewed pictures from Flickr Commons, a 17-year-old program focused on making photography collections from cultural institutions more accessible to the public. The Flickr Commons 1k Collection includes photographs from the U.S. National Archives, NASA, the Library of Congress, and the George Eastman Museum.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive will upload the 2024 End of Term Web Archive to the Filecoin network alongside previous End of Term archive data. Since 2008, the End of Term Web Archive project has captured and saved U.S. government websites at the end of presidential administrations. 

MIT Open Learning and OpenCourseWare (OCW) 

MIT Open Learning and OpenCourseWare have uploaded selected content to the Filecoin network, including foundational courses, like Single Variable Calculus, and climate and sustainability topics, like Urban Energy Systems and Policy, to support the institution's needs for robust, tamper-proof archiving and alternative channels for distribution.

Starling Lab

Starling Lab recently launched a 22-petabyte Filecoin storage node at the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries. Initial collections stored include parts of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which features testimony from survivors of atrocities, multiple photojournalism projects, and 3D/VR scans of historical sites.

A New Era of Digital Preservation

Decentralized networks like Filecoin are revolutionizing how data is stored, verified, and shared. Filecoin uses cryptographic proofs to establish data integrity, verifying that files remain intact and unaltered over time. Filecoin distributes data across a decentralized global network, ensuring that information remains accessible even if parts of the network go offline. 

Filecoin Foundation remains committed to its mission of preserving humanity’s most important information. Each week, Filecoin Foundation highlights critical datasets stored on the Filecoin network. Follow Filecoin Foundation on BlueSky and X to keep up with the latest additions. 

Network News 

Building Together: The power of collaboration in the Filecoin ecosystem. CIDgravity, a pricing and client management tool for Filecoin storage providers (SPs), and Lighthouse, a platform built on Filecoin offering perpetual storage, encryption, custom gateways, and multi-chain smart contracts, announced a partnership to combine their strengths to deliver more comprehensive solutions for data clients. Read more. 

Read the February 2025 Developer Grants Updates. Filecoin Foundation continues to support new, impactful projects, and recently introduced program updates to empower more developers in the Filecoin ecosystem.

Build With Us

Join us at Filecoin Code n' Corgi Denver! This developer-driven series is designed for builders in the Filecoin ecosystem as a perfect launchpad to kickstart your Web3 journey or take it to new heights. Join us for hands-on workshops, engaging demos, and meaningful connections that spark collaboration and drive innovation.

Use Filecoin to store and retrieve data. Explore verifiable, resilient, cost-effective cloud storage that traditional providers can’t match, and discover how the Filecoin network's cutting-edge decentralized storage solutions can help your business thrive.

Ecosystem Spotlight 

Recall Network

Recall is a decentralized platform for testing, verifying, and evolving AI agents –powering trustless, machine-verifiable decision-making building, with plans to store all AI agent data on Filecoin.

Network Operations 

How Filecoin Plus is Powering Decentralized Storage. Marta Piekarska-Geater, Executive Director of Filecoin Incentive Design Labs (FIDL), joins DWeb Decoded to discuss Fil+, governance challenges, and the incentives shaping the future of decentralized storage.