# Why Filecoin Onchain Cloud?

Traditional cloud storage solutions present several challenges:

- **Centralized Control**: Data and services are controlled by a single provider
- **Limited Transparency**: Operations and pricing are opaque
- **Vendor Lock-in**: Difficult to migrate between providers
- **Trust Requirements**: Users must trust providers to handle data properly
- **Fixed Payment Models**: Inflexible billing tied to specific providers

## The FOC Solution

Traditional cloud services offer performance and usability but lack transparency, auditability, and user ownership. **Filecoin Onchain Cloud** bridges this gap by introducing a **trustless execution layer** for decentralized services. Each service in the Onchain Cloud — from storage to payment — operates as a smart contract, ensuring that every action, transaction, and proof is **verifiable on the Filecoin blockchain**.

FOC is designed to:

- ✅ **Enable hot and verifiable data storage and retrieval** with Proof of Data Possession (PDP) & Filecoin Beam
- 🧩 **Simplify developer integration** through the Synapse SDK — a TypeScript library for building Filecoin-native dApps
- 💰 **Power programmable payments** via Filecoin Pay — a token-agnostic payment rail for decentralized services
- 💻 **Provide programmable services** — Smart contract-based, composable service primitives on top of the Filecoin network
- 🚀 **Foster innovation** by letting teams build, fork, and combine services into new decentralized applications

### Key Differentiators

| Feature | Traditional Cloud | Filecoin Onchain Cloud |
| --------- | ------------------ | ------------------------ |
| Data Control | Provider controlled | User owned |
| Transparency | Limited | Full blockchain verification |
| Programmability | Provider APIs | Smart contracts |
| Payment Models | Fixed | Flexible & programmable |
| Trust Model | Provider trust | Cryptographic proofs |
| Vendor Lock-in | High | None |

### Use Cases

Filecoin Onchain Cloud opens the door for new classes of verifiable applications:

- Decentralized data storage and pinning platforms (e.g., Filecoin Pin)
- AI and compute services tied to verifiable data pipelines
- Autonomous agents that own, store, and pay for their data
- Regulatory-compliant archiving systems with proof-of-retention
- Data DAOs and programmable marketplaces for shared data sets

By unifying data, payments, and verifiability, FOC provides the foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications — where storage is not just a service, but a verifiable primitive.

## Getting Started

Ready to start building with Filecoin Onchain Cloud? Check out our [**Getting Started guide**](/getting-started/) to learn how to integrate the Synapse SDK into your application.

The **Synapse SDK** provides a simple, familiar API that abstracts away the complexity of blockchain interactions, allowing you to focus on building your application while leveraging the power of decentralized storage.