ConsenSys and Protocol Labs team up to integrate Filecoin into Ethereum's dev tools

Blockchain firm ConsenSys has made official a collaboration with open-source software laboratory Protocol Labs to integrate Filecoin’s marketplace for data storage with ConsenSys’ Ethereum product stack.

According to the announcement, Filecoin’s miners, developers and users of the network will be able to access ConsenSys' development tools such as Infura, MetaMask and others to integrate with Ethereum’s decentralized finance ecosystem.

Last Thursday, at block 148,888, the Filecoin network launched its public mainnet, featuring a capacity of more than 600 petabytes of data, as well as 600 active data miners and 230 projects interacting with the storage protocol.

Given these figures, James Beck, global public relations lead at ConsenSys, told Cointelegraph that Ethereum DApps and projects can become “more fully decentralized by storing relevant data on Filecoin rather than relying on a centralized cloud service.”

Beck commented on why this integration is critical for Filecoin:

“Applications on Ethereum need a decentralized data storage solution, which is why integrations with Infura and MetaMask are critical to enable easy-use for developers to integrate Filecoin/IPFS with Ethereum. […] ConsenSys Codefi, which provides tokenization, trading, and compliance products for the DeFi sector, has added support for Filecoin and will use its Activate platform to catalyze the launch of the Filecoin network.”

Through Infura, Codefi, MetaMask and other ConsenSys projects, Joseph Lubin, founder and CEO of ConsenSys, stated that developers will “easily integrate IPFS and Filecoin functionality" into their apps and "seamlessly interoperate with Ethereum-based functionality and other apps at every layer of the stack, from the protocol layer to the financial layer with DeFi."

On Wednesday, Codefi Activate also launched Filecoin Storage, a dashboard for the file storage system available through a web app and an API. According to Filecoin, the goal is to make price discovery for storage on the Filecoin network “simple and transparent.” A representative from Filecoin also shared with Cointelegraph some of its near-term plans:

“We also have ongoing collaborative work between ConsenSys R&D and Mesh R&D, creating a secondary retrieval market, in which users could retrieve data that is reliably stored using Filecoin. The secondary retrieval market will broaden participation in the Filecoin ecosystem by enabling a range of devices to retrieve files, including Web browsers and phones.”