GLIF Overview

GLIF - Filecon's foundational DeFi primitive.

What is GLIF?

GLIF is the foundational DeFi primitive of Filecoin - enabling Filecoin token holders to earn sustainable rewards on their FIL by lending (aka “leasing”) it to a diverse pool of Filecoin Miners (also known as “Storage Providers”). Storage Providers borrow FIL to use as pledge collateral in Filecoin mining, which helps Storage Providers grow and simultaneously improves the security of the Filecoin network. Similar to "liquid staking" solutions for PoS networks like Lido or Jito, GLIF solves a major capital inefficiency on the Filecoin network, and is Filecoin's first and most popular DeFi protocol.

Problem Statement

Prior to the launch of the FVM in March of 2023 (Filecoin’s built-in virtual machine allowing developers to deploy custom solidity smart contracts to the Filecoin blockchain), the network was bottlenecked with capital inefficiencies. Storage Providers (the network’s “Miners”) had no permissionless, efficient, and flexible way to borrow FIL to use as storage mining collateral, and the majority of Filecoin token holders had no safe and accessible opportunities to lend FIL to Storage Providers to earn native, sustainable rewards.

GLIF fills the gap between FIL token holders and Storage Providers through the use of smart contracts, creating a highly efficient, scalable, and trust-minimized marketplace with predictable rules. GLIF enables token holders to sustainably earn rewards and Storage Providers to scale their growth.

The History of GLIF

The GLIF brand has been a long-term trusted partner of the Filecoin ecosystem since early 2019, receiving more than 4 million dollars in grant funding from Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation to build critical apps and tools for the Filecoin network. Most notably, GLIF built the first Filecoin web wallet and multisig wallet for Filecoin’s Mainnet launch, which are still widely used today across the ecosystem for Filecoin payments, ecosystem grants, and general day-to-day operations.

In 2023, GLIF received 4.5 million dollars in venture capital funding led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Fenbushi Capital, Dialectic, Zee Prime Capital, Fintech Collective, and Big Brain Holdings to continue our work on Filecoin’s foundational DeFi primitive.