Filecoin for Agents
How AI agents can use Filecoin Cloud (FC) for storage that is persistent, portable, open, and verifiable, without a human in the loop.
AI agents can use Filecoin Cloud (FC) to give their context, artifacts, and records a home that survives the session, the tool, and the vendor: storage that stays portable across agents and frameworks, open with no single point of lock-in, and verifiable end to end.
This page is a starting point for building agents that use FC. It links out to the CLIs, SDKs, and console you'll actually use, rather than repeating their full documentation here.
Overview
Agents forget. When a session ends, a tool gets swapped, or a vendor shuts down, whatever an agent learned or produced usually disappears with it. Every skill built on Filecoin Cloud (FC), starting with publish below, aims to fix that around four ideas:
Persistent. Your agent's context, artifacts, and records survive the session, the tool, and the vendor. Nothing it learns or makes disappears when the window closes.
Portable. Move useful state across agents, models, frameworks, and teammates, including across org boundaries.
Open. Neutral infrastructure with exportable ownership and no lock-in of valuable agent state.
Verifiable. Underneath it all, the retrieved bytes are the written bytes. This isn't the pitch, it's the reason the pitch is credible, and it surfaces where it earns its keep: enterprise audit conversations.
Filecoin for agentic use cases
A few patterns come up often when agents use FC:
Durable agent memory and outputs. Agents that need to persist state, logs, or generated artifacts (files, datasets, reports) across restarts or across a fleet can pin them to Filecoin and keep a verifiable, addressable record of what they produced and when.
Verifiable identity and provenance. Agents that register a verifiable identity (for example, under ERC-8004) can back that identity with metadata stored on Filecoin, so other agents or services can verify both who an agent is and that its declared capabilities/data haven't disappeared. See Filecoin Pin for ERC-8004 Agents for a full walkthrough.
IPFS-compatible by default. If an agent (or the framework it's built on) already speaks IPFS, adding Filecoin persistence doesn't require new tooling. Content stays addressable by the same Content Identifier (CID).
Paying as it goes. Storage and other services can be funded once and drawn against automatically, instead of a human provisioning and paying upfront for each use.
Quickstart: publish an artifact
publish is the first in a growing set of packaged skills for the use cases above; more are on the way for agent memory, identity, and beyond. The fastest way to see it working end to end is to have an agent publish a file using the publish skill, the way an agent would share an artifact it just produced. The skill drives the Filecoin Pin CLI underneath, so everything here works whether an agent invokes the skill or you run the CLI directly.
Before you start, make sure you have:
An Ethereum-style wallet on Filecoin. See Wallets. You'll use it to approve access from a browser, not to hand a key to the agent.
FIL in that wallet, to cover transaction fees.
USDFC in that wallet, to pay for storage. USDFC is Filecoin Cloud's storage-payment stablecoin. 5 USDFC is enough to start.
Node.js 24 or later.
Install the skill and the CLI it drives:
Log in once. Run
filecoin-pin loginand approve a scoped session key in the Filecoin Cloud console from your wallet. No private key ever touches the agent, and the key can be revoked from the console at any time.Set up payments in the console. Authorize the Warm Storage Service to spend USDFC and deposit funds into Filecoin Pay, both in the console's Add Service flow, in a single wallet transaction. A session key can't move money, so this step is always a human's.
Ask the agent to publish something. Say "publish this," "share this file," or "pin this." The agent hands back a link like
https://inbrowser.link/ipfs/<cid>, first the moment the CID is known, then confirmed once verification passes.
Prefer to drive the CLI directly instead of through the skill? The same filecoin-pin add, filecoin-pin payments setup, and filecoin-pin data-set commands work standalone, including a direct private-key mode. See Filecoin Pin: Getting Started for that walkthrough.
Common questions
How does an agent verify its data is still stored, instead of just trusting the upload succeeded? Storage providers submit proof, on a recurring schedule, that they still hold the data (Proof of Data Possession, or PDP). An agent can query this directly at any time (for example with filecoin-pin data-set show <DATASET_ID>) rather than relying on a one-time confirmation.
Can an AI agent use Filecoin without a human approving each transaction? Yes. Once an agent's wallet is funded and payment authorization is set up (a one-time step, typically done by a human operator), the agent can store data and pay for it directly. No per-transaction approval is required.
Does an agent need to hold and manage FIL and USDFC directly? Yes, today. An agent's wallet needs FIL (for transaction fees) and USDFC (Filecoin Cloud's storage-payment stablecoin) for payments. Filecoin Pay is where those payments settle; the Filecoin Pay Console is where a human operator can inspect or adjust what an agent's wallet is authorized to spend.
How does an agent authenticate for payments today? By running filecoin-pin login (or using the publish skill in the Quickstart above, which calls it by default), which pairs the agent with a scoped, revocable session key instead of a raw wallet private key: a human approves a one-time pairing link from their wallet, and the agent holds only that limited key afterward. Direct private-key access still works as a fallback for the CLI; see Filecoin Pay Console below for where session keys are managed.
Resources
Filecoin Pin CLI
A CLI (and JS library, and GitHub Action) for pinning IPFS-compatible content to Filecoin with verifiable, provider-proven persistence. This is what the quickstart above uses, and it's the right starting point for any agent that just needs to store and retrieve files or datasets.
Filecoin Pin: Getting Started →
Filecoin Cloud CLI
A community-built CLI (also installable as an agent skill and MCP server) for the broader FC stack: wallet setup, dataset management, and storage-provider queries via the Synapse SDK. Where Filecoin Pin focuses on pinning content, Filecoin Cloud CLI is closer to a general-purpose control surface for FC, and it's built to be driven by an agent directly (npx skills add FIL-Builders/foc-cli), not just by a human at a terminal.
Filecoin Pay Console
A web console for managing the payment side of FC: connect a wallet to view and manage payment rails, deposits made in USDFC, and the services you've authorized to draw against them. A human operator uses it directly to authorize spending and fund an agent's session; an agent-driven CLI also opens it briefly, for the one-time wallet approval a session-key login requires.
The console is currently in beta and interacts directly with the underlying payment contracts. Verify transaction details before confirming anything.
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