After years of work, the Filecoin mainnet is now live , and as we shared last week , Mainnet Liftoff is an amazing milestone for the entire community. There are now over 100 useful applications and tools built on Filecoin, 600 TiB of storage transactions have increased the use of Filecoin, and nearly 700 PiB of storage capacity is growing at a rate of 500 TiB per hour. What also makes Filecoin unique is the amazing ecosystem of projects that have integrated this decentralized storage layer. From ConsenSys for the Filecoin network, to the Filecoin archive curated by the Internet Archive, to the builders of the entire IPFS community, these help make Filecoin a huge force. The Filecoin mainnet is a highly anticipated launch, 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 interplanetary stack used by many web3 projects (including IPFS, libp2p, IPLD, and Multiformats); Next, let's review the history of Filecoin. Back in 2014, when Filecoin first came out, “web3” was still in its infancy. Vitalik Buterin had just launched the Ethereum whitepaper, and “blockchain” was just beginning to attract a large following. When Gavin Wood published “Dapps: The Vision of Web 3.0,” he proposed four components of the next generation of the web: “ static content publishing, dynamic messaging, decentralized transactions, and integrated user interfaces .” This laid the foundation for new projects to meet these needs. In 2014, protocols such as IPFS (content-addressed file sharing), libp2p (peer-to-peer network), 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 can set back hundreds of years of progress and innovation. As more and more people communicate online, this becomes a growing existential risk. If we can make knowledge more accessible, more efficient, and more resilient, we can build a better foundation for our future visions, with scientific research accompanied by the exact data needed to reproduce that knowledge or reanalyze it. This vision all dates back to the founding of the Internet, the idea of a decentralized but interconnected network of nodes and routers with no single point of failure. In the early 2010s, the original vision of the web took a backseat to centralized forces around dynamic personalized content that collects user data to provide targeted advertising. 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 presented insights and visions to "completely reinvent the core technologies that underpin the web." Filecoin, IPFS, libp2p, and similar protocols emerged as a new generation of tools to reshape the Internet and make it faster, more secure, and more open. 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 web3 building blocks used by Filecoin and other projects already existed, such as libp2p (a flexible peer-to-peer network layer), IPLD (a hash-linked data model), and IPFS (a data exchange protocol that enables content-addressable file sharing). These modular projects helped make the web3 ecosystem more interoperable, collaborative, and interconnected. We are building tools and protocols around Filecoin’s Proof of Replication and SpaceTime Proof of Stake to enable us to complete and improve our interoperable web3 stack and power new interplanetary ecosystems. 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 some shared values that we try to encode into the protocols we are building. Values such as transparency, openness, modularity, interoperability, and a single agent. From building Testground to help simulate and verify network performance in distributed systems at scale, to creating Drand to provide a production-grade distributed randomness beacon. We are lucky to be working on many valuable problems in such a fertile space, and these apparent side projects are ultimately the most important critical projects to ensure we create a decentralized, robust, and efficient foundation for human information. Over the past three years, we have formed a not-so-secret superpower, an amazing and thriving community dedicated to the success of Filecoin. The three core pillars of Filecoin's strength are Filecoin miners, ecosystem developers, and storage clients. Since 2019, miners have not only been the core operators of the Filecoin network, but have also been deeply involved in the refinement and improvement of Filecoin implementations such as Lotus and go-filecoin. Miners have always been core participants since the release of Filecoin devnet. In February 2019, we opened the Lotus testnet. In December 2019, we had the calibration network and space race. In August 2020, we conducted a comprehensive stress test on the network. During this time, miners submitted thousands of detailed problem reports, spent hours on feedback, debugging, etc., 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 have helped new miners, answered common questions, and debugged network issues. These miners are superstars, but it is 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 such as the FIP process, the Bug Bounty program, and others 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, as well as the growing community participation in security analysis and reporting on the newly launched bug submission site. 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 the long-term quality of service they provide to network clients. Filecoin's cryptoeconomics rewards reliable and useful storage, incentivizing a strong collaborative mining community to continuously improve Filecoin and enable more storage applications and use cases for many years to come. 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 efforts. The momentum behind decentralized applications built on Filecoin comes from the thriving IPFS ecosystem. Decentralized applications built on IPFS + Ethereum have long been waiting for a solution for persistent storage, and Filecoin Liftoff Week bridged the communities of IPFS, Ethereum, and Filecoin builders in new and interesting ways. The latest collaboration between ConsenSys and Protocol Labs will further accelerate the bridge between these thriving communities. Some of the exciting applications and use cases in the ecosystem already include: Consumer storage applications, including Slate and Fleek, 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 of which are built on Livepeer; Archival storage use cases, including Filecoin Discover, Kiwix, and the Internet Archive, aim to preserve many culturally significant and valuable datasets;
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 across 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 developers can use to build powerful applications based on Filecoin without having to sync their own node; Glif Wallet, a lightweight web interface for sending and receiving Filecoin via Ledger devices.
Finally, there were hundreds of new teams entering the ecosystem from hackathons to accelerators, including: HackFS is a month-long hackathon held by ETHGlobal that produced more than 130 new Filecoin-based applications and teams; Apollo , a mentorship program run by Gitcoin , has guided 50 teams through their initial MVPs on the Filecoin network; Filecoin Launchpad, an accelerator run by Tachyon with 13 teams building serious companies and organizations on Filecoin; Filecoin Frontier, the accelerator run 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 to mainstream adoption. Today, a diverse community of Filecoin storage clients is building on the decentralized storage network. Filecoin clients store some of humanity’s most important datasets on Filecoin, preserving them through a resilient global storage network. Across several initiatives and collaborations, hundreds of individuals and organizations are working to preserve important datasets on this new decentralized storage layer of the network. This is just the beginning, and we’re already starting to see Filecoin become the storage layer for some of these extremely valuable datasets. Through the Filecoin Discover project, over the past few months we’ve enabled access to 3PB of important public access datasets by hundreds of miners on the Filecoin network . These datasets include Wikipedia , Google Landmarks , 1000Genomes , Arxiv.org , OpenNeuro , etc. Through programs like Filecoin Slingshot, community members have stored over 700 TB of Creative Commons-licensed podcast and music archives, package manager registries, biodiversity datasets, astronomical data, and more on the Filecoin network for long-term storage. Our community of storage customers helps create a healthy, efficient, and affordable storage market; strengthen our storage software and user experience; and identify and refine the core value proposition that allows Filecoin to meet 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 is a storage product for large data storage clients that are particularly interested in data provenance and Filecoin's verifiable storage capabilities; Filecoin.tools, a tool that helps storage clients and storage developers monitor the state of their storage on the Filecoin network; Process CSV export scripts into a backup index of data stored on Filecoin for record keeping and retrieval; Codefi Storage is used to track miner reputation and monthly storage price per GiB.
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 us see this vision become a reality. We are excited to continue working with you to build a new network together. Mainnet Liftoff is a huge milestone for the Filecoin project, and we stand at the doorstep of a new era of the dweb, where any application, smart contract, or NFT can store and access its own data in a decentralized storage layer without any middlemen. Filecoin unlocks unprecedented applications, such as decentralized machine learning databases that can fund their storage costs through pay-per-use model training fees, or decentralized social media platforms that can increase playback speeds by adding voting to videos that can be replicated faster. 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.The Filecoin ecosystem already has tremendous momentum as projects built on Filecoin grow and the network gains new features. Since the launch of the network, the innovation flywheel has begun to improve the Filecoin protocol - there have been 5 FIPs (Filecoin Improvement Proposals) 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 into the network, ensuring that Filecoin is a valuable, high-growth useful storage network. The Filecoin community is now the shared owner of the network, and Filecoin creates value for the world, so all miners, clients, developers, ecosystem partners, and token holders have the right 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 that could never be burned. Thanks to a global community of storage miners, accessible web tools, and enthusiastic storage clients, we are getting closer to realizing this vision and enabling countless new use cases. If you want to get involved, please submit your ideas to Filecoin Archives, a new project in partnership with the Internet Archive to organize, preserve, and disseminate humanity’s most precious data on Filecoin. Together, we can ensure that humanity’s most precious resources are protected from disaster or attack and can benefit future generations. Thank you to everyone, past, present, and future, who has contributed their talents, insights, hard work, and resources to make Filecoin’s mission a decentralized, efficient, and powerful foundation for humanity’s information. We are grateful to continue to build this network, ecosystem, and community with you. |
