Filecoin Foundation and FilOz have introduced Filecoin Onchain Cloud, a decentralized cloud platform built to help developers create more resilient and customizable onchain applications. The launch, announced during Devconnect in Argentina, arrived at a timely moment, as a major Cloudflare outage disrupted key crypto sites and highlighted how much the decentralized web still depends on centralized infrastructure.
In a post announcing the new service, the Filecoin cloud team noted that recent outages at large cloud providers have taken dApps, explorers, and wallets offline. They said this underscores the need for distributed systems that avoid single points of failure.
A programmable cloud built on Filecoin
Filecoin Onchain Cloud is designed to make storage more reliable and programmable for a growing smart contract economy. The platform draws on the same philosophy that shapes the wider Filecoin ecosystem, where different storage markets and policies allow developers to pick what fits their needs.
Molly Mackinlay, who leads FilOz and has contributed to many core Filecoin technologies including IPFS, said the team realized they already had the building blocks to build programmable cloud tools directly onchain with the Filecoin Virtual Machine. Work on the cloud protocol began about a year ago. The system is already running, though she noted it is still in its early stages.
According to Mackinlay, the long-term vision is to let any onchain product or service connect to this cloud layer. It brings together Filecoin’s verifiable storage, fast retrieval, and support for the USDFC stablecoin. Teams such as ENS and Safe are already testing “DeFi frontends” that function like regular websites but with the added benefits of blockchain transparency and resilience. A retrieval egress feature will allow users to pay per bandwidth while rewarding service providers that deliver content.
Filecoin creator Juan Benet added that the goal is to support full data pipelines, from storage and retrieval to processing and transformation.
Early partners explore new infrastructure
Beyond ENS and Safe, several AI-focused blockchain teams are experimenting with the cloud to gain cryptographic guarantees they cannot get elsewhere.
Monad, an upcoming EVM Layer 1, is using Filecoin Onchain Cloud to build and train AI models that are transparent and auditable through its Blueprint program. Meanwhile, the team behind Agent0 is attaching agent activity data to the system to prove it has not been altered.
Benet emphasized that cloud users fully own their stack, making it portable across Filecoin’s global network of independent storage providers. Data is content-addressed using IPFS and the Filecoin Pin retrieval system, which helps ensure it cannot be quietly changed or replaced.
Filecoin Pay, positioned as the settlement layer for the cloud, adds another element. It supports verifiable, pay-per-use services where balances and payments are onchain, easy to query, and auditable. Supported payments include FIL, USDFC, and other ERC-20 tokens.
“You could run full cloud workloads without relying on any major U.S. company or a centralized point of failure,” Benet said.
