Growth and Innovation in the Filecoin Ecosystem

On December 11th, ETH Global and Filecon hosted the Storage Market Summit (SMS). Part of the day was dedicated to growth and innovation in the Filecoin ecosystem. Here are the summaries, themes, and conclusions from the different conversations during this part of the day.

You can browse the agenda and view the full Ecosystem Growth & Innovation session here.

The following is a summary of a presentation given at SMS by Michael Zargham, CEO and co-founder of BlockScience.

What are commons? Commons are institutions used to manage a common pool of resources. A commons consists of three main components: the people (participants), the shared resources themselves, and the process by which those resources are shared (i.e., governance).

A digital commons is a public application involving public ownership of distributed and information resources and technologies. Viewing the Filecoin network as a digital commons can help us better understand its power and potential, as well as the path for ecosystem growth. Viewing Filecoin as a digital commons allows us to coordinate at scale and collectively provide a set of heterogeneous services. We can build strong relationships across layers to achieve the net effect of a powerful, Web3-based cloud system that can realize real-world use cases.

In the Filecoin digital commons, the main components are:

1. Community: storage miners, storage clients, researchers, developers, investors.

2. Shared resources: hardware, software, and data.

3. Governance: Economic coordination mechanism, Filecoin Improvement Process (FIP)

Sustainability is fundamental to the health of any digital public. The economic mechanisms contained in the code cannot ever be perfect. Any aspect of the Filecoin system will evolve over time in response to the participants in the system and their demands from the network.

Filecoin’s digital economy is turning the so-called “tragedy of the commons” on its head. It becomes the “triumph of the commons.” Participating in the Filecoin network creates value for other participants. New applications building the Filecoin ecosystem can increase the value of other existing applications. This model allows for ideation, discovery, and the iterative process of building these commons together.

Below is a summary of Ocean Protocol founder Trent McConaghy’s speech on SMS.

Ocean Protocol’s mission is to open up data access and the economy while maintaining privacy. The project’s long-term mission is for self-sovereign data for individuals and groups.

Today, the massive data economy (which amounts to $400 billion in Europe alone) has become a “shadow” economy. Controlled by a handful of companies, we have little visibility or transparency into the levers behind the data market. We should move towards an open transparent, permissionless data economy. Complementary tools like Filecoin and Ocean can make a difference by leveraging cryptocurrencies to open up this economy.

So what is the ocean? The ocean is three things :

1. A community and ecosystem of individuals and organizations committed to the mission of an open data economy.

2. A set of tools that serve as public infrastructure to grow and sustain the ecosystem.

3. A logo that promotes and maintains ecosystem dynamics (OCEAN).

The Ocean Protocol toolset includes:

1. Data Tokens - Tokenized Access Control

2. Ocean Market - Data Exchange Web Application

3. Deployment to Ethereum mainnet (Autumn 2020)

4. Privacy protection - through "computational data"

Datatokens are ERC-20s that make it easy to publish and consume data services. If you have a 1.0 datatoken, you can access a specific data service. You can take this datatoken structure and build it around DeFi to create a completely complementary marketplace. MetaMask becomes a data wallet and Aragon becomes a dataDAO. DEXs and CEXs become data exchanges. Etherscan becomes a data provenance tool.

Ocean Market is a DEX fine-tuned for data. Ocean Market uses a forked Balancer AMM to reduce costs. On the marketplace, users can publish, buy, sell, consume, and stake data. The more Ocean stakes on a set of data, the greater the signal of its quality. Ocean Market has been running for 6 weeks and already has 1.3M OCEAN pools, +30k visitors, 164 dataset pools (each its own AMM), and 268 published datasets.

With Filecoin, users can leverage Ocean to launch their own Filecoin data marketplace, or create a Filecoin dataDAO or index fund. With Ocean Protocol’s tools and Filecoin’s decentralized storage database, we are witnessing the birth of an open data economy for the first time.