The booming Filecoin ecosystem: understanding its true value

Among the questions raised by Filecoin followers, there is one topic that can never be avoided - practical applications. What practical or noteworthy applications are there in the Filecoin ecosystem?

In 2021 alone, the number of projects in the Filecoin ecosystem has increased from 40 at the beginning of the year to 330. Use cases have also gradually become richer, including NFT, Web3, games, metaverse, audio and video, defi, etc. From this trend, we can also see that the Filecoin ecosystem is gradually expanding rapidly towards real public needs.

In today’s article, we will first give you an overview of the entire Filecoin ecosystem. After that, we will update the relevant content and introduce representative cases in specific fields so that you can have a deeper understanding of the practical application of Filecoin.

Two-way choice between projects and Filecoin

First of all, we must understand that the project party and Filecoin are actually a process of 1+1>2 - they need to realize their own value through each other, and also promote the development of each other while developing themselves.

For a project, they first have storage needs before choosing a storage provider. The choice of storage providers is complex and diverse. Projects that choose Filecoin for storage transactions are mostly due to the following reasons.

The first is an open market . This is also the most direct reason why most projects choose Filecoin. In the Web3 market, the environment will encourage storage providers to set effective prices, rather than a fixed price. That is, the price is determined by supply and demand. Projects can freely choose storage providers, and can freely choose cheaper ones, or larger and more stable ones. This is not possible with traditional centralized cloud service providers.

Second, large-capacity storage . As of March 2022, Filecoin's committed storage capacity has exceeded 16,000PB, equivalent to 65,000 Wikipedias and 1,600 Netflix movie archives . It can almost be said that it can meet the storage needs of all projects.

The third is storage security . First, it provides crypto-economic guarantees through unique proof of replication and proof of space-time, and verifies storage through zero-knowledge proof. Secondly, it uses economic penalties. If the storage provider fails to pass the verification and the security of the data cannot be confirmed, it will be enforced and part or even all of the pledged coins will be deducted.

For Filecoin, the need is also very clear, that is, to increase useful storage , especially storage use cases specific to Web2 and Web3. If you understand Filecoin's island economy , you will understand that increasing useful storage is also an important way to ensure the steady growth of the ecosystem.

Adding up the storage capacity bound in the transaction can quantify the demand for Filecoin. But this also raises a question: how to distinguish useful storage and prevent storage providers from abusing the network?

To solve this problem, Filecoin developed Filecoin Plus , which can incentivize providers to participate in storing real data by verifying useful data.

How to build an ecosystem

In order to develop the ecosystem, Filecoin is supported by many organizations and communities, which are called ecosystem working groups. This concept has also been mentioned in the island economy. Participants are responsible for maintaining and upgrading the underlying protocol, supporting the development of the ecosystem, and promoting governance .

The organization is led by Protocol Labs, the Filecoin Foundation, and Outercore (a subsidiary of Protocol Labs responsible for grants, accelerators, and special projects) , and mainly includes the following organizations.

If you have paid attention to the previous content of Interstellar Cloud Storage, you will find that activities such as hackathons, accelerators, funding projects, training guidance, etc. are important channels for actively developing the ecosystem. Hackathons alone have selected and developed 56 Filecoin-related projects.

FVM is also an area worth paying attention to. It is set to unlock programmable storage primitives (such as storage bounties, auctions) , cross-chain interoperability bridges (such as Ethereum, Solana, NEAR) , data-centric DAOs, and layer 2 solutions (such as reputation systems, data availability sampling, computing structures, and incentive-aligned content delivery networks) . I believe that more possibilities will be developed on this basis.

The composition of the ecosystem

Currently, the Filecoin ecosystem is divided into 12 categories, including data market, public data, video, consumer storage, online publishing, games, NFT, verifiable storage, decentralized identity, and others. The proportion of projects in each category can be referred to the size of the square in the above figure. The larger the square, the more projects there are in this field.

There are four items in public data storage : one is the data market, which refers to projects related to the economy and data economy; the second is public data, which includes projects that contribute to the storage of public data; the third is general storage, which refers to general data storage projects; the fourth is archives, which contains projects that need long-term storage and preservation.

The consumer storage aspect includes five items, namely video, consumer storage, online publishing, gaming, and NFT storage and market-related projects.

In addition, there are verifiable storage projects , which refer to projects that can protect and verify integrity; decentralized identity , which was also mentioned in previous articles on Interstellar Cloud Storage, refers to projects that introduce personal sovereignty into identity management, as well as other projects.

in conclusion

Decentralized storage is still in its early stages, but we can feel the thriving development of the Filecoin ecosystem. They have actually been widely used in Web3. For people who are still in the traditional Internet era, there may be few projects in Web2, but in Web3, it has become an important part of the foundation of its network.

At the same time, we have to admit that Filecoin’s current effective storage is still a drop in the bucket compared to its network size, and filling these gaps is also one of Filecoin’s main challenges.

But Filecoin is still a cutting-edge part of the Web3 network, providing the foundation for Web3, and these problems are also the problems faced by the entire Web3 network. We believe that with the development of Web3, Dapps built on these protocols will only become more and more abundant, while bringing more vitality to Filecoin .