Huobi, Protocol Labs jointly launch $10M Web 3.0 incubation center

Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi and Protocol Labs, the firm behind the decentralized web hosting system IPFS, have announced an incubation center aimed at advancing Web 3.0

According to a Nov. 24 announcement, Huobi said that it will launch the Huobi-Filecoin Incubation Center with $10 million aimed at developing Protocol Labs’ interplanetary file system. The center will focus on incubating, investing and community development for projects that employ IPFS and its Filecoin (FIL).

Protocol Labs user experience lead Jessica Schilling explained in an October Modern Consensus column that IPFS aims to break the internet free from the monopolistic control of a few mega-corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and China’s Alibaba and Tencent. She also noted that the system can prevent censorship in places like Turkey, where a local version of Wikipedia is being hosted after the government blocked access to the standard Web 2.0 version of the site.

The incubation center will collaborate with existing Filecoin accelerators and incubators, provide funding to promising projects in the ecosystem, and host annual summits and quarterly meetups globally to help the parties involved connect. The initiative will be under the supervision of Huobi Group Chief Investment Officer Sharlyn Wu.

Huobi believes “that IPFS and Filecoin will be the foundation of the next generation of internet” which is often called Web 3.0. This is intended to provide a distributed and largely decentralized internet. According to the announcement, the technology will help create a data storage and distribution system which is safer, more equal, and accessible.

Huobi CIO Sharlyn Wu explained that “decentralized storage is a great experiment that combines cloud storage with the decentralized mechanism of blockchain.” She highlighted that the exchange believes that Filecoin is the infrastructure that the next internet will be built on. Still, she admitted that the technology is still very much at an experimental stage:

“Decentralized storage in the blockchain world is also still in the 0 to 1 stage. Viable use cases, incentive mechanism designs, and the system’s robustness and effectiveness are yet to be tested. There are still many gaps to be filled in the Filecoin ecosystem, whether from theoretical research or technological development standpoint; we see that the entire ecosystem needs more resources and support.”