Review of Filecoin’s 7-year history

Note: This article is a translation of the latest blog from Filecoin Protocol Labs on October 29. Note that it is difficult to perfectly translate technical concepts from one language to another. Therefore, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of this translation. The original article can be found here: https://filecoin.io/blog/journey-to-liftoff/

After years of work, the Filecoin mainnet is now live! ?As we shared last week - the mainnet ignition transition is an amazing milestone for the entire community. Now, more than 100 useful applications and tools have been built on Filecoin, and up to 600TiB of storage orders have made Filecoin's storage capabilities practical. The storage capacity of the Filecoin network has grown at a rate of 500 TiB per hour to nearly 7️00PiB!

In addition to the Filecoin network's incentive mechanism to reward high-quality, long-term data storage, what makes Filecoin different is the amazing ecosystem that integrates a decentralized storage layer. From the ConsenSys tool suite for the Filecoin network, to the Filecoin Archives curated by the Internet Archive, to the builders in the entire IPFS community, it is these outstanding and impressive community participants who invest and help to make Filecoin great. We say thank you!

The Filecoin mainnet launch is a highly anticipated release - a huge leap for the Web3 ecosystem. Filecoin brings a verifiable storage layer to the decentralized web, adding an important storage incentive structure to the many web3 projects that use the InterPlanetary File System, including IPFS, libp2p, IPLD, and Multiformats. As with any launch moment, it’s easy to forget where things came from - huge progress and innovation needs to go from “impossible” to “live!” Let’s take a look back 7 years ago, when the idea for Filecoin was first formed…

At the Beginning

Back in 2014, when the idea for Filecoin first came up, “web3” was still in its infancy. Vitalik Buterin had just launched the Ethereum whitepaper, and “blockchain” was just beginning to attract a significant following. When Gavin Wood published “Dapps: What Web 3.0 Will Look Like,” he proposed four components of the next generation of the web: “static content publishing, dynamic information, trustless transactions, and integrated user interfaces.” This laid the foundation for new projects to meet these needs.

Computer scientists have been pursuing distributed operating systems since the advent of Plan 9 at Bell Labs in the 1980s, and the ability to seamlessly combine cryptography, blockchain, and git-like content addressing technologies makes it possible to actually create a verifiable, reliable, distributed storage network consisting of hundreds of independent, untrusted peer nodes that can work together to help preserve humanity's most important knowledge. Back in 2014, protocols such as IPFS (content-addressed file sharing), libp2p (peer-to-peer), and IPLD (hash-linked data structure) that form the basis of the Filecoin data storage network were just getting started.

It all started with a dream: What if we could use the tools from the p2p revolution of the early 90s to prevent disasters like the burning of the Library of Alexandria? The destruction of generations of knowledge would set back hundreds of years of progress and innovation. This is becoming an increasing risk as more and more of our lives are online. If we can make knowledge more accessible, more efficient, and more resilient, then we can build a better foundation for our future ideas and discoveries - scientific research is based on accurate data that can be re-analyzed or re-produced, especially when data centers cannot take away or shut down the data tools we need, and the entire interconnected knowledge graph - the network - is redundantly preserved and connected to thousands of independent network participants.

In many ways, this vision dates back to the founding of the Internet — a network of decentralized but interconnected sites and routers with no single point of failure. In the early 2010s, the original vision of the web gave way to centralized power around dynamic personalized content that harvested user data to deliver targeted ads. These weren’t the many small Internet sites, but behemoths like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. At the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit, Vint Cerf (one of the inventors of the TCP/IP protocol), Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the World Wide Web), Juan Benet (creator of IPFS and Filecoin), and others came together to “completely reinvent the core technology that underpins the web” (Clint Finley, WIRED). Filecoin, IPFS, libp2p, and similar protocols emerged as a new generation of faster, more secure, and more open tools that are beginning to take back the Internet.

Ignition achieved: all systems online

Filecoin’s bold mission is to create a decentralized, efficient, and powerful foundation for humanity’s information. Achieving Ignition, while only one step on this path, is a monumental achievement that will require years of hard work from a massive community.

In the early years, we laid the foundation for Filecoin by building the web3 technology stack that most projects across the ecosystem now use. The core building blocks of web3 that Filecoin and other projects use already exist — such as libp2p (a flexible peer-to-peer networking layer), IPLD (a hash-linked data model), and IPFS (a data exchange protocol that enables content-addressable file sharing). These modular projects help make the web3 ecosystem more interoperable, collaborative, and interconnected.

Long before we pioneered the uniquely difficult research problems around Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime for Filecoin, this community was building tools and protocols to enable us to refine and improve the interoperable web3 stack that powers the new InterPlanetary File System. Passionate communities and ecosystems have formed around these projects, bringing together like-minded collaborators to make challenging ideas a reality. At the core of these communities are a few shared values ​​that we try to encode into the protocols we are building. Things like transparency, openness, modularity, interoperability, and a single agent.

Since then, we’ve learned a valuable lesson: crypto, p2p, and economic systems are damn hard! Over the years we’ve been blown away by the incredible contributions and progress in these ecosystems in cutting-edge research (advancing areas like verified delay functions, randomness beacons, p2p network design), broad cryptoeconomic design and analysis, and advanced systems engineering. We’ve been lucky to work on many valuable problems in such a fertile environment — from building test environments to help simulate and verify network performance in distributed systems at scale, to creating Drand to provide a production-grade distributed randomness beacon. These obvious side quests are ultimately the most critical projects to ensure we create a decentralized, robust, and efficient foundation for human information.

Over the past 3 years, we have formed a not-so-secret superpower - an amazing and thriving community working towards Filecoin’s success. The three core pillars of Filecoin’s strength are the miners, developers, and storage clients that power this market.

Mining

In addition to being core operators of the Filecoin network, the mining community has been working to refine and improve Filecoin software such as Lotus and go-filecoin since 2019. Miners were the first core participants since the release of the Filecoin open development network, and we have fully stress-tested the network in February 2019, the mature Lotus testnet in December 2019, and the Calibration network and Space Race in August. During this time, miners have submitted thousands of detailed issue reports, spent hours on Slack and Zoom discussing, debugging issues, and submitted important patches, features, and optimizations upstream to benefit the entire mining community and ecosystem.

Miners have also become huge advocates for each other and the network. Throughout the Space Race, many community champions have stepped up to help new miners, answer common questions, and debug network issues. These miners are superstars, but it’s also in the best interest of all miners as co-owners of the network to help manage the value of the network and maximize the success of miners’ operations. Programs like the FIP process, the Bug Bounty Program, and the Development Rewards Program are common ways for miners to reinvest their expertise to continue improving Filecoin. A lot of effort has been put into the Filecoin Improvement Process (30+ comments on the recently released FIP-4 and new proposals are released every week), and the newly launched security.filecoin.io community site for security analysis and reporting is growing.

Filecoin is a completely new type of blockchain mining. In addition to maintaining consensus and state updates on the public blockchain, Filecoin miners are also network storage service providers who will be rewarded for providing long-term service quality to network clients. Filecoin's cryptoeconomics rewards reliable and useful storage services - incentivizing a strong collaborative mining community to continuously improve Filecoin and onboard more storage applications and users for many years to come.

Network construction

The network of developers, entrepreneurs, and builders is the heartbeat of the Filecoin ecosystem. The Filecoin ecosystem has over 90 meaningful collaborations across a variety of applications, clients, developer tool providers, infrastructure services, and more. Over 250 new teams entered the ecosystem through Filecoin Ignite to learn, build, and launch applications on the network. The future of Filecoin and web3 is in the hands of these builders, and we are very optimistic that the next wave of incredible applications and use cases will stem from their creativity and hard work.

The momentum behind decentralized applications built on Filecoin comes from the thriving IPFS ecosystem. Decentralized applications based on IPFS + Ethereum have long been waiting for a solution for long-term storage, and Filecoin Liftoff Week bridged the IPFS, Ethereum, and Filecoin builder communities in new and interesting ways. The latest collaboration between ConsenSys and Protocol Labs will further build bridges between these thriving communities.

Some of the exciting applications and use cases in the ecosystem already include:

• Consumer storage applications, including Slate and Fleek, that make it easy to store files on IPFS and Filecoin

• DeFi use cases, including Filecoin storage and the Filecoin DeFi Bridge, which help miners, clients, and token holders interact in a more efficient way

• Decentralized video applications, including File.Video and Voodify, both built on Livepeer

• Archival storage use cases, including Filecoin Discover, Kiwix, and Internet Archive, aim to preserve many culturally significant and valuable datasets

•And many others!

In addition, there is a lot of infrastructure and tooling to help developers build on Filecoin:

• Textile’s Powergate, an API-driven solution for deploying multi-tier storage between Filecoin and IPFS

•Truffle Preserve, which simplifies the process of preserving long-lived application data on IPFS and Filecoin

• Infura’s Filecoin Network API, which enables developers to build powerful applications on top of Filecoin without having to sync their own node

• Glif Wallet, a lightweight web interface for sending and receiving Filecoin via Ledger devices

Finally, there are hundreds of new teams entering the ecosystem from hackathons to accelerator events, including:

• HackFS, a month-long hackathon run by ETHGlobal that produced over 130 new applications and teams building on Filecoin

• Apollo, a mentorship program run by Gitcoin, has guided 50 teams through their initial MVP on the Filecoin network

• Filecoin Launchpad, an accelerator run by Tachyon with 13 teams building serious companies and organizations on Filecoin

•Filecoin Frontier, an accelerator operated by LongHash in Singapore and Shanghai, is recruiting a new group of teams that will build applications on the network!

We firmly believe that the future of Web3 is in the hands of these talented developers, entrepreneurs, and builders, and we are excited that the Filecoin community is supporting their efforts to transition Web3 into a mainstream application network.

storage

Last but not least is the diversity of Filecoin storage clients who are leveraging this decentralized storage network. Filecoin clients store some of humanity’s most important datasets on Filecoin, preserving them through a resilient global storage network — much of which would otherwise be lost or too expensive to store. Across several initiatives and partnerships, hundreds of individuals and organizations are working to preserve important datasets on this new decentralized storage layer, the Filecoin network.

Our society collectively generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. That includes 294 billion emails, 64 billion WhatsApp messages, 500 million tweets, telemetry data, sensor data, and more every day. While much of this data is saved, analyzed, and otherwise used, over 90% of the data we generate as a society is routinely discarded. This is just the beginning, but it’s a start, and we’re already starting to see Filecoin become the storage layer for some of these extremely valuable datasets that might otherwise be lost. Over the past few months, through the Filecoin Discover project, we’ve made 3PB of important public access datasets accessible on the Filecoin network through hundreds of miners. These datasets include Wikipedia, Google Landmarks, 1000Genomes, Arxiv.org, OpenNeuro, and many more.

Through programs like Filecoin Slingshot, community members have long-term stored 700 TB of Creative Commons-licensed podcast and music archives, package manager registries, biodiversity datasets, astronomical data, and more on the Filecoin network. Our community of storage customers has helped create a healthy, efficient, and affordable storage market; strengthen our storage software and user experience; and identify and refine Filecoin’s core value proposition for the needs of storage users.

Filecoin storage clients and developers have also built tools to make data storage and management on Filecoin as simple as possible, such as:

•The Starling project, a storage product for large data storage clients that are particularly interested in data provenance and the verifiable capabilities of Filecoin storage.

•Filecoin.tools, which helps storage clients and storage developers monitor the status of their storage on the Filecoin network.

• Process CSV export scripts to back up indexes of data stored on Filecoin for record keeping and retrieval

• Codefi Storage is used to track miner reputation and monthly storage price per GiB

• And much more!

Since the beginning of our journey, we have dreamed of solving important problems that will ultimately lay the foundation for the evolution of human information. A truly dedicated, resourceful and inspired community of storage customers is helping to turn this vision into reality. We are excited to continue working with you to build a new network together.

The Future of Filecoin

Mainnet ignition is a huge milestone for the Filecoin project — but it’s just the beginning. We stand at the doorstep of a new era of the distributed web — one where any application, smart contract, or NFT can store and access their own data in a decentralized storage layer without any middlemen. Filecoin unlocks applications never before possible, like decentralized machine learning databases that can charge a per-use model training fee to cover their storage costs, or decentralized social media platforms that can add voting to videos to increase replication speed and therefore playback speed. The next innovative applications in web3 will leverage the new foundation laid by Filecoin, IPFS, and libp2p to build applications and networks we can’t even imagine yet. ✨

We are still in the early stages, but the Filecoin ecosystem already has tremendous momentum - as projects built on Filecoin grow and the network gains new features, we will see compounding returns. Since the launch of the network, innovative gears have begun to improve the Filecoin protocol - 5 FIPs (Filecoin Improvement Proposals) have been released since the network launched. For example, the Filecoin Plus program (FIP-0003) is designed to stimulate strong incentives for all miners to search for the world's most important datasets and load them onto the network - ensuring that Filecoin is a valuable, high-growth network that can be used for the storage of efficient data.

These improvements are just the beginning of supporting the growth and innovation of the Filecoin network — there’s more to come. The entire Filecoin community is now a shared owner of the network, and Filecoin creates value for the world — so all miners, clients, developers, ecosystem partners, and token holders have a voice and responsibility to participate in the conversation. The future of Filecoin depends on you.

When we started, our goal was to build a Library of Alexandria to preserve humanity’s most precious knowledge so that it could never burn down. Thanks to a global community of storage miners, accessible web tools, and enthusiastic storage clients, we’re getting closer to realizing that vision and enabling countless new use cases. If you want to get involved, submit your ideas to Filecoin Archives, a new project in partnership with the Internet Archive that aims to organize, preserve, and disseminate humanity’s most precious data on Filecoin. Together, we can ensure that humanity’s most precious resource — our hard-earned knowledge in fields from science to history — is protected from disaster or attack and can benefit future generations. ?

Thank you to everyone, past, present, and future, who have contributed their talents, insights, hard work, and resources to lay the foundation for Filecoin’s mission to “become the decentralized, efficient, and robust cornerstone of humanity’s information.” We are grateful to continue to build this network, ecosystem, and community with you. ?