Juan Benet

Juan Benet was born in Cuernavaca, Mexico.⁠[1]

He studied computer science at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry and received a bachelor’s degree in 2010. As an undergraduate he focused on distributed systems and spent two summers on research, one on private data sharing and one on routing protocols for wireless sensor networks.⁠[2][3]

In May 2014 Benet founded Protocol Labs; that year the company took part in Y Combinator’s Summer 2014 (S14) batch and raised funding.⁠[4]

On July 14, 2014, he posted the paper “IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System” on arXiv as sole author, describing the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as “a peer-to-peer distributed file system.” Protocol Labs states that development of both IPFS and Filecoin began in 2013 and that the initial papers for both were released in July 2014.⁠[5][4]

In February 2015 go-ipfs, the Go implementation of IPFS, reached alpha. In 2016 Protocol Labs raised funding from BlueYard and Union Square Ventures; in June that year the networking library libp2p was split out of IPFS as a separate project, and Multiformats and IPLD were also split out that year.⁠[4]

In 2017 Protocol Labs ran the Filecoin token sale, raising $205.8 million in total. Filecoin is a storage network incentivized by a cryptocurrency, invented by Benet and developed by Protocol Labs.⁠[4][2]

On December 23, 2017, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry posted the a16z Podcast episode “a16z Podcast: Trends in Cryptocurrencies,” a brief discussion recorded at the a16z Summit in November 2017 in which Chris DixonChris DixonChris Dixon is a programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, and the founder and managing partner of a16z crypto. He co-founded SiteAdvisor and Hunch, helped create Founder Collective, and later joined Andreessen Horowitz, investing in technology companies such as Coinbase. He is also the author of Read Write Own and has long written about blockchains, network ownership, the open internet, and the combination of AI and crypto.Open the full entry, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, talked with Benet and Olaf Carlson-WeeOlaf Carlson-WeeOlaf Carlson-Wee is an American cryptocurrency investor, the first employee of Coinbase, who founded the crypto investment firm Polychain Capital in 2016. Polychain returned more than 20-fold after fees in its first full year and passed $1 billion in assets under management in early 2018 before falling sharply in the bear market; it then expanded its venture investing, backing projects such as Uniswap, Solana, and Bittensor.Open the full entry, founder and CEO of Polychain CapitalPolychain CapitalPolychain Capital is a digital asset investment firm founded in 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee and headquartered in San Francisco. Its business covers actively managed blockchain asset portfolios and investments in related companies, with public investments spanning base networks, cryptography, on-chain finance, payments, data and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, about the big picture for crypto. The episode page introduced Benet as founder and CEO of Protocol Labs.⁠[6]

The show notes describe a discussion that started from how blockchains can fund and coordinate open-source work and went “beyond the buzz around ICOs to the golden age of protocols.” The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019, under the title “a16z Podcast | Trends in Cryptocurrencies.”⁠[6][7]

In 2018 Fortune placed Benet, then 30, at No. 14 on The Ledger 40 Under 40, noting that he graduated from Stanford University and went through Y Combinator, and quoting his aim for IPFS to “improve upon—and replace—HTTP.”⁠[8]

On October 15, 2020, the Filecoin mainnet launched at block height 148,888. Protocol Labs is the network’s parent company, and Filecoin is built on IPFS. In the same year Protocol Labs also launched drand, a randomness beacon.⁠[9][4]

Protocol Labs began transitioning to a decentralized network in 2021, launched the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) on mainnet and introduced the PL Venture Studio in 2023, and completed its transition to a decentralized innovation network in 2024. It describes itself as an innovation network connecting startups, funds, accelerators and foundations working in web3, AI, AR/VR, brain-computer interfaces, hardware and other fields.⁠[4]

Protocol Labs: Official website: https://pl.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

X: Public account: https://x.com/juanbenet (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbenetcs/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]