The Internet Archive, an American nonprofit behind major digital archive Wayback Machine, has received a $10 million cryptocurrency donation from the Filecoin Foundation.
According to a Friday announcement, the Filecoin Foundation has donated 50,000 Filecoin (FIL) tokens to the Internet Archive, worth more than $10 million at the time of writing. The grant is designed to help the Internet Archive increase access to its online library including books, data, web pages, music and software.
In addition to the donation, the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle and director of partnerships Wendy Hanamura have joined the boards of advisors for the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web.
A digital librarian and a computer engineer, Kahle founded the Internet Archive back in 1996 with “bold efforts to record the entire Internet.” He expects that new technologies like Filecoin will help further transform digital libraries by making them more decentralized:
“Libraries have always used the technology of the day, whether it’s cuneiform back in Sumerian Babylonian times, or papyrus paper, or microfilm. Today, the Internet Archive is built on hard drives. Our hope is that new technologies like Filecoin will revolutionize the storage market and decentralize it. We are thrilled to collaborate with an organization that shares a like-minded approach.”
The Internet Archive is an early cryptocurrency adopters. The nonprofit has been accepting donations in major cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) since 2011. Since ts inception, the Internet Archive has received as much as 880 BTC on its publicly available Bitcoin address, with a total balance amountint to 4.5 BTC, or around $270,000 at the time of writing.
The Internet Archive now accepts donations in altcoins like Ether (ETH), XRP, Zcash (ZEC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) through publicly available addresses. The nonprofit also allows donations in a number of other altcoins like Dogecoin (DOGE) through cryptocurrency exchange Changelly .
The Filecoin Foundation’s donation to the Internet Archive comes amid Filecoin experiencing a massive price rally, with the FIL token breaking to the top 10 cryptos by market capitalization on April 1. After hitting its new all-time high of above $230 yesterday, FIL subsequently slipped below $190, according to data from CoinMarketCap. At publishing, the token is trading at $203, still up over 100% over the past seven days.
Filecoin 24-hour price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap
