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👋Introduction

An overview to Lighthouse

What is Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is a permanent, decentralized storage protocol powered by Filecoin and IPFS. It allows individuals, developers, and enterprises to store data forever with a simple, one-time payment model—eliminating recurring cloud costs while ensuring verifiable, tamper-proof security.

With Lighthouse, your files are stored across a decentralized network of Filecoin miners and can be accessed anytime through dedicated IPFS gateways optimized for speed, media delivery, and scalability.

Why Lighthouse?

  • Perpetual Storage Pay once and preserve your files permanently without renewals.

  • Decentralized Security Your data is stored on IPFS + Filecoin, ensuring immutability and reliability.

  • Encryption & Access Control Use Kavach Threshold Encryption and token-gating to keep data private and grant access via tokens, NFTs, passkeys, or zkTLS.

  • Dedicated IPFS Gateways Fast retrieval for files, including 4K video streaming at scale.

  • Decentralized Image Resizing Optimize images on retrieval—save bandwidth without losing quality.

  • Flexible Payments Choose annual or lifetime plans, pay with credit/debit cards or on-chain tokens.

  • No Vendor Lock-In Retrieve and migrate data anytime with full user control.

Tools for Developers

  • Lighthouse SDK – Libraries, APIs, and docs to integrate decentralized storage into apps.

  • Lighthouse CLI – Manage files directly from your terminal with simple commands.

  • Encryption SDK – Easily secure and token-gate private files across chains and networks.

Expanding the Data Economy

Lighthouse doesn’t just store data—it powers new ecosystems:

  • Data DAOs – Create decentralized organizations to preserve, govern, and monetize data.

  • AI Data Monetization – Store datasets, apply access control, and enable AI model training.

  • Private Processing – Compute over private data while keeping it encrypted.

  • Cross-Ecosystem Support – Built for AI, DePIN, NFTs, gaming, L1/L2 blockchains, and more.

Backed by Trusted Partners

Lighthouse is already integrated into leading ecosystems like SingularityNet, Cardano, and OKContract, and is trusted for secure storage in the NFT, modular blockchain, and AI data markets.

Why It Matters

Traditional cloud providers rent your data back to you. Lighthouse redefines storage with permanent, affordable, and verifiable solutions, enabling the next generation of apps, DAOs, and AI systems to thrive on secure and censorship-resistant infrastructure.

With Lighthouse, your data doesn’t expire—it lives forever.

IPFS and Filecoin

While both IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and Filecoin are pivotal technologies in decentralized storage, they serve distinct but complementary roles:

  • IPFS: A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to store and share files in a distributed file system. It uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace, making it efficient for retrieving cached data and sharing files.

  • Filecoin: A decentralized storage network that incentivizes storage providers and clients to offer and use storage space. While IPFS handles the distribution and retrieval of files, Filecoin ensures that those files are stored reliably over time through economic incentives.

By leveraging IPFS with Filecoin underneath, Lighthouse leverages the strengths of both technologies: the efficient file retrieval, immutability of IPFS with the reliable, incentivized storage of Filecoin. This combination ensures low-cost, verifiable, and perpetual storage solutions.

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