Filecoin Community Highlight: Slate

On top of the Filecoin protocol, application developers and service providers are building easy-to-use end-user tools for file storage and sharing. One of the most exciting projects in this wave of growth and innovation is Slate, an open source storage system built on Filecoin. Slate is the first storage application designed to encourage collaboration and research across a distributed network.

The creation of Slate is the first step towards a thriving network, powered by IPFS, Filecoin, and Textile, open and available to everyone for data storage and transactions. Over the past 8 months, a team of more than a dozen engineers, designers, and developers have worked together to make Slate a reality. At the time of its release in September 2020, the application was already loaded with 200GiB of real user data.

We invited Jimmy Lee, founder of Slate, to learn about the status of the project since the launch of the Filecoin mainnet.

Jimmy Lee: During Filecoin Launch Week in October 2020, Slate had so many Filecoin storage transactions that the transaction brokers and workers temporarily overwhelmed the network! We did 1,000 transactions in 30 minutes, which was incredible.

Today, we are witnessing a ton of improvements to Lotus that will allow us to fire up the trading machine again in 2021 and join this incredible network. We want Slate to be the easiest way to trade storage with the Filecoin network.

We are honored to work with the Filecoin Network team and build an attractive platform where people can join the concept of decentralized file storage. In the coming months, we are excited to introduce more people to OSS and prove that these services are as powerful as the enterprise version of the service. We believe that people want to know how their tools work, and Slate is a great example of this. Instead of organizing a company with opaque processes, you can use a protocol that respects your values.

JL: At the end of October, we launched Slate 2.0. We redesigned the layout engine to make Slate web pages more flexible for collecting, organizing, and sharing files. The team also added great new tools that give you more control over the look and feel of Slate.

These tools allow you to resize, reorder, and even overlap your images. It's as easy as hitting the edit button and letting Slate 2.0 take a spin! We then added some quick actions to files to make it even easier to connect to Slate from files anywhere on the web.

In November, we turned our sights on search, making it easier to search Slate with just a single keystroke. Now you can seamlessly navigate between files, list pages, and user profiles. And you can more easily discover what others are putting out on the web.

To date, we have over 4,800 users and 23,000 public file uploads on Slate. This growth is amazing! We have 312 stars and 18 contributors to the project. Slate has always aimed to be open source, unlike centralized cloud storage projects like Dropbox, Pinterest, or other enterprise businesses. We want everyone to see all the frameworks of our software and be able to make their own software.

JL: There are so many different use cases, from PDFs to videos. One of my favorite recent developments is the Unity WebGL integration, which really opens the door to everything that is possible on the platform. This is part of the promise of Slate , which is an application that everyone can share and work on together.

Overall, it was great to see some of our 17 contributors working outside of the core team. For example, Tara Lin from the Slate team did an amazing job creating the new marketing page.

The community response has been amazing too! Check out some of the love we've received on Twitter.

JL: We really care about the Filecoin retrieval market. We are working with the Textile team to ensure that we can load the entire IPFS block storage into a Textile Bucket. Just imagine that you will be able to create a wonderful world of files on Slate, and then store it on the Filecoin network for anyone to retrieve. When they retrieve it, it will appear just like you designed it!

We really care about not needing to authenticate with Slate, so we added libp2p authentication. As long as you have libp2p, you can use Slate as an interface. We hope to work with more teams and integrate more APIs, such as Infinite Scroll, Space Storage, and Infura.

There will be much more to come in 2021. Please stay tuned and follow us on Twitter for the latest information!