The mission of blockchain network Filecoin: Ending the monopoly of oligopolistic cloud storage

From instinct to intelligence, humans have undergone tremendous changes over thousands of years, and the same is true for storage.

Modern data storage has been around for about a hundred years. How could people 100 years ago have imagined that the IOPS (storage device performance indicator) of all-flash arrays could reach more than 2 million?

As the saying goes, “curiosity makes people progress, boredom makes people fall behind.” From the initial way of recording information, our ancestors have gone through tens of thousands of years of exploration, to the current era of intelligent storage, and the possible era of super intelligent storage in the future, which constantly urges us to be bold in creation and innovate technology in an unconventional way.

The most terrible thing in the world is not being punished for making a mistake, but being satisfied with the status quo and standing still. This is true for human development, social development, and technological development.

The Internet has reached a new bottleneck since its development, and there have been no major technological breakthroughs in recent years. With the growth of data traffic, most data storage in modern life faces the problem of centralization, and the problems brought about by centralized storage, such as privacy leakage, low server security, censorship, and termination of operations , have also made people anxious.

Problems must be solved. Problems do not cause hesitation, but rather become the driving force for development. The same is true for the emergence of Filecoin.

As a decentralized distributed storage network built for humanity's most important information, Filecoin's mission is to decentralize and disrupt the highly centralized cloud storage market.

The Filecoin network was developed to bypass existing cloud storage providers and their business models, which bundle relatively cheap, scalable data storage with expensive proprietary software, application programming interfaces, servers, and other infrastructure.

As the amount of data stored approaches hundreds of zettabytes, current Web 2.0 storage platforms continue to provide huge profits, including infrastructure, platform and hosted private cloud services. The cloud storage market is estimated to be between $46 billion and $96 billion .

However, such a large storage market is concentrated in the hands of a few monopoly corporate groups.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, along with Chinese cloud giants Alibaba and Tencent, account for about two-thirds of the global cloud storage market, according to a survey data report from Synergy Research Group.

Simply put, most corporate data and information are now stored in these major service providers, and all data storage pricing rights are controlled by them. End users have no right to negotiate prices, so current cloud storage is an oligopoly.

Filecoin uses blockchain technology to allow users to negotiate directly with crypto token "miners." The blockchain framework allows consumers to identify and verify local storage facilities and negotiate prices through the protocol platform.

At the same time, Filecoin’s decentralized model corresponds to current approaches, which typically host and store user data in regional data centers at a fixed rate.

The launch of Filecoin mainnet marks the beginning of its entry into the practical application stage.

In the Fileocin network, cryptocurrency transactions are broadcast, verified, and recorded in a distributed ledger through the network. Fundamentally, the Filecoin decentralized network is designed to eliminate the "middleman" , that is, large public cloud providers.

The Web 2.0 business model has driven the shift of enterprises to multi-cloud deployment. More decentralized cloud deployment can avoid being locked in by vendors, and Filecoin will take this strategy a step further by creating a decentralized storage network, upgrading Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. The Filecoin protocol supports storage "sectors" of up to 32 Gb for up to 18 months, which can increase the feasibility of this goal.

The unique feature of Filecoin is that it allows customers to have their own pricing and bargaining power, breaking the exclusive pricing mechanism of centralized cloud storage providers and returning to the original intention of the market to dominate the economy. In the long run, this will undoubtedly be beneficial to the healthy development and progress of the data storage industry.

So far, Filecoin has attracted more than 600 miners and the storage space has exceeded 600PiB. We believe that with the launch of the main network, the actual implementation of applications, and the real transactions between storage demanders and providers, more miners and customers will continue to enter.

In the economic report released by Filecoin in August, it was mentioned that "the distribution of storage can achieve local optimization" , which also ensures that Filecoin will be able to effectively convey various types of information in the future and will respond faster than centralized storage platforms. At the same time, local optimization can make big data storage closer to users and no longer rely on large regional data operators.