Bermuda Picks Filecoin in Bet on Web3 to Safeguard Public Data

A Web3 initiative will see datasets including employment and labour publications uploaded to the Filecoin Network in collaboration with the Internet Archive. 

"[The partnership] strengthens the resilience of our public records and ensures that citizens of Bermuda and people around the world can verify the integrity of our data," David Burt, Premier and Minister of Finance said in an announcement coinciding with the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. Uploaded records are said to represent critical components of Bermuda’s digital archive which may feed into future digital governance initiatives.

The Filecoin Foundation, which describes Filecoin as the world’s largest decentralized storage network, said that backing files within a network of storage providers with proofs on blockchains boosts the resilience, verifiability and long-term preservation of the data. "Having information available and continuing to be available is a critical part of democracy," Marta Belcher, President and Chair of the Filecoin Foundation told Sandmark. "Ensuring that information continues to be available, regardless of administration changes or infrastructure issues is really critical."

Bermuda, a North Atlantic territory that passed a Digital Asset Business Act in 2018, has pledged to put its entire economy onchain as it vies with other island jurisdictions to be a regulated crypto hub. Crypto giants Circle and Coinbase, both licensed to operate on the archipelago, expressed their support for policies aimed at lowering transaction costs and providing greater access to international finance via digital wallets for Bermudans.

The fragile internet

The Filecoin initiative highlights growing concerns among internet users worldwide – the disappearance of online data. 

In studies in 2024, Pew Research found that 38% of webpages from 2013 were inaccessible a decade later. Around a quarter of news and government websites contain broken links, with older content being more vulnerable to disappearance. A report conducted by Filecoin backed up these numbers, finding that the median lifespan of a webpage lasts about 2.3 years. 

Beyond the loss of online content, major internet outages in 2025, such as those of Cloudflare and AWS, disrupted access to millions of companies’ websites. The loss in connectivity put vast datasets at risk of being lost and brought company functions to a standstill. 

Cyber-criminals see centralized databases as particularly attractive targets – billions of records may be exposed as a result of a single hack, court cases show. Many government websites use the same cloud services and centralized databases to store both public and private data, amplifying these risks. 

"The issue is that you have these single points of failure," said Belcher. "Whether it's an outage or the next administration comes in and just deletes everything there are all sorts of reasons that data go down when you have this very fragile centralized infrastructure."

To avoid these risks, decentralized storage backed with onchain proofs can provide added security. When uploaded onto the network, files are replicated across multiple storage providers, removing single points of failure which can protect against cyber-attacks and localized outages. Each file, along with every edit after upload, is assigned a content identifier, highlighting later adjustments or retractions. All this feeds into the verifiability and transparency of the data. 

"You're looking for a piece of data based on what it is instead of where it is," said Belcher. Once the piece of data is found, it's pulled up from the nearest available storage provider. The approach can also protect against internet blackouts and restrictions. Data stored in 10 different locations around the world are retrievable as long as the data are available in one of those locations.

Government back-ups onchain

Bermuda’s government is not the first to use Filecoin’s onchain storage capabilities for public data. In Aruba, a constituent country of the Netherlands in the Caribbean, the same tools have been used to collect and back up national archives, making them digitally available for a global audience. The End of Term Web Archive collects and maintains access to US government data beyond the end of presidential terms. Through the Filecoin Foundation's collaboration with Internet Archive, these data are stored on the Filecoin network.

More than a thousand pebibytes of data has been uploaded to Filecoin’s network, including data on war crimes and journalists’ reporting material from areas of political upheaval. A single pebibyte is more than a thousand terabytes, considered to be enough storage for about one trillion pages of text.

"People are starting to realize that just because something is on the internet at one point in time doesn't mean that it's going to be there forever," said Belcher. "Governments are starting to pay attention to that issue and want to make sure that the data that are collected for the benefit of the public remain available to the public into the future."