At DePIN Day Singapore, Clara Tsao of the Filecoin Foundation joined Fluence co-founder Tom Trowbridge for a fireside chat on ten years of decentralized storage.
In a conversation that bridged the early days of blockchain with the present momentum of DePIN, Clara reflected on Filecoin’s evolution from a 2014 white paper into the world’s largest decentralized storage network — and on what it means to build infrastructure for a future where trust in data is more fragile than ever.
Alongside Tom, the discussion unpacked how storage, compute and governance intersect, why decentralization still matters in an increasingly AI-driven world, and what lessons new DePIN builders can draw from Filecoin’s first decade.
Filecoin’s story began long before “DePIN” became a defined category. In 2014, Juan Benet outlined a vision for a decentralized data marketplace in the original Filecoin white paper. The protocol’s mainnet launched six years later, quickly growing into the world’s largest decentralized storage network by capacity.
In the first few years, the focus was on availability — building a global base layer capable of storing and securing massive datasets. Then came the next stage: quality and usability. From Internet Archive backups to government data and NFTs, Filecoin became the default infrastructure layer for long-term, verifiable storage.
By 2023, the network had evolved beyond scale alone, prioritizing the quality of data stored and enabling new forms of discovery through AI agents running atop Filecoin’s open archives. “We’re already seeing researchers and journalists uncover new insights from historical data that would’ve taken years to analyze manually,” Clara noted.
The age of synthetic data and the fight for trust
A central theme of the discussion was trust. Drawing on her background in counter-terrorism and digital forensics, Clara highlighted how disinformation and synthetic media have made data provenance one of the defining challenges of the decade.
“We’re living in a world where trust in data is more fragile than ever,” she said. “AI can now generate videos, images and documents that look entirely real — but verifying where that data came from and how it’s been manipulated is becoming exponentially harder.”
For Filecoin, that mission of verifiable storage has never been more relevant. By making data tamper-proof, traceable, and openly verifiable, decentralized networks can restore a foundation of truth to digital information.
Filecoin, Fluence, and the DePIN stack
The conversation also underscored how storage and compute are converging as pillars of the DePIN ecosystem. Tom noted that while Fluence provides the compute layer — decentralized, verifiable execution — Filecoin serves as the persistent data layer, together forming the foundation for fully decentralized applications.
“You can imagine Filecoin as the global library of data,” Clara explained, “and Fluence as the computational brain operating on top of it.”
This composability is already visible in the broader DePIN ecosystem, where projects like WeatherXM use Filecoin’s storage to reward contributors for uploading accurate weather data.
