Coinbase invests in Textile, the Flickr-like startup

Coinbase is one of the companies that have invested $1.5 million in the Textile startup, a decentralised file storage solution.

The investors are Multicoin, Coinbase Ventures, BlueYard Capital and Collaborative Fund.

The protocol used by the Textile startup is called the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and it is an open protocol created by Protocol Labs, the same company behind the Filecoin ICO.

According to Textile co-founder and CEO, Andrew Hill, IPFS isn’t a very well known and used protocol, despite being one of the biggest inventions of the last decade, enough to have already proved its worth in countless use cases. 

This new protocol creates a new architecture for the web, in which data is not stored according to specific locations, such as the server on which it is saved or the URLs, but according to their content. In this way, it is possible to easily store several identical copies of the same data to make the web more efficient, and less prone to loss of data or connectivity to individual resources. 

BlueYard led this round of financing for the Textile startup, which also included Coinbase, considering that it is already an investor in Protocol Labs and other applications that rely on IPFS. 

According to BlueYard co-founder Ciarán O’Leary, the Internet could be improved if the current client-server model were rethought and if a new web were created in which users would have to authorise apps to use their data, instead of the other way around. To do this, according to O’Leary, it is necessary to use software such as Textile. 

In fact, one of Textile’s goals would be to launch a decentralised alternative to services such as Flickr that allow images to be saved and shared, helping users to control their data using IPFS. 

Interested users can already subscribe to the waiting list to use the Textile photo app. This application will allow users to fully own their own images and then choose who to share them with or not.