Spotlight: Seal Storage

Bridging Filecoin with Scientific and Academic Research: Seal’s Role in the Ecosystem

The internet's history is deeply intertwined with academia, evolving from a network designed for research institutions to a global digital infrastructure. Seal Storage, a decentralized cloud storage platform, is following a similar path within the Filecoin ecosystem by focusing on the needs of the scientific and academic communities. Through strategic collaborations and a commitment to scalability, Seal is creating opportunities not only for itself but for the entire Filecoin community.

This post is part of a regular series that spotlights teams across the Filecoin ecosystem who are helping to make the protocol more accessible, usable, and resilient for everyone.

Seal is one of over 2,000 storage provider systems in the Filecoin ecosystem, but over the last three years, Seal has taken a unique approach to building its business and invested heavily in the development of a highly automated platform designed to operate at enterprise grade and scale.

In recognition of this effort, and in alignment with Filecoin Foundation’s broader vision to preserve humanity's most important information, the World Economic Forum recognized Seal Storage as a Technology Pioneer. In turn, this has led to a number of large scale projects with world renowned research institutions, including the ATLAS Experiment at CERN which uses hundreds of petabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider. Seal also recently began a project with the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI) in partnership with The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) using a large volume of NASA climate data for the 2026 IEEE SciVis challenge which encourages innovative solutions addressing real-world issues such as climate prediction, power grid resilience, and environmental impact analysis.

Paving the Way for Filecoin’s Potential

Global research extends into many exabytes of data, growing at rates never seen before. Although Seal has a vision for how big this can become, it won’t happen without the partnership and participation of many other storage providers around the world. With that in mind, Seal has been building its platform to address a couple key challenges: 1) unifying the customer experience across multiple, decentralized storage providers, and 2) reducing service delivery costs for improved margins and efficiency.

Here we note some of Seal’s latest collaborations and how the broader Filecoin community and likeminded storage providers can get involved:

• Dedicated Resources on Site: In the case of the ATLAS Experiment at CERN, Seal has a full time engineer in Geneva dedicated 100% to the project. This ensures the right domain expertise to solve the challenges specific to the needs of CERN, and it opens the door to opportunities to work with other research institutions who utilize the same data.
• Rucio: Rucio is CERN’s data management platform, which handles over a billion files and an exabyte of data across 120 research institutions globally. Seal is one of the only cloud-based storage platforms integrated with Rucio. Seal has done the heavy lifting to integrate with this network making it possible for other Filecoin storage providers to work with them to do the same.
• ESnet: Seal is also pairing its operations with ESnet, the high-speed, highly secure scientific network funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. ESnet connects over 50 DOE sites and more than 270 research and commercial networks globally, facilitating collaboration at scale.
• SOC 2 and HIPAA-Certified Storage: Seal’s tech stack has been certified as both SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant. Meeting these industry requirements is essential for enterprise clients which plays a crucial role in strengthening Filecoin’s position as a competitive and reliable alternative to traditional cloud providers.

Opportunities with organizations like CERN are just the beginning. The proliferation of AI-driven data systems, IoT, biotechnology device driven data generation and the like are accelerating the need for new, mass-scale storage solutions, and Filecoin is well positioned to become a vital platform for preserving humanity's most important data.

In the upcoming months, Seal will be working with additional storage providers to further the utility of its platform in service of the shared needs of the entire community. If you are a storage provider interested in learning more, you can reach Seal at sealstorage.io/contact or contact Sal Malik directly at [email protected].