Filecoin Community Highlights Series Episode 8 — Figment Networks

Welcome to the eighth installment of the Filecoin Community Highlights series, which features users and developers building essential tools and services on the Filecoin network. We hope that this post, and the others in this series, inspires you to build world-class tools for the distributed web.

Andrew Cronk and Yannick Folla manage product and growth for Figment Networks , which provides enterprise-grade nodes and staking infrastructure as well as developer tools for Web3 protocols. Last month, Figment Networks launched DataHub , which makes it easier for developers to leverage blockchain technology without having to become protocol experts.

We spoke with Andrew and Yannick about Figment Networks’ interest in Web3 and what tools they offer to help enable the future of Web3.

Figment lowers the barrier to entry for blockchain developers. We want to make it easier for developers to build the next generation of blockchain technology by providing tools to stake tokens, build applications, and participate in blockchain governance.

The company was founded in 2018 by Matt Harrop, Lorien Gabel, and Andrew Cronk, each of whom has experience working in the infrastructure and security fields. Together, we share a common commitment to decentralized technology. Figment Networks' guiding principle is to support the adoption, growth, and long-term success of the Web3 ecosystem.

Our products include enterprise-grade nodes and staking infrastructure , the Hubble Web 3 Explorer , and a host of developer tools we call DataHub . We also actively participate in blockchain communities and governance groups based on the protocols we support, and we continually publish educational resources to increase awareness of Web3 development.

Figment Networks is a distributed-first company, even though most of our DevOps team and most of our data centers are based in Canada. To our knowledge, we are the largest blockchain infrastructure provider in Canada.

We have been working with blockchain data, building reporting tools and our Hubble Explorer over the past few years. We have had to solve many technical challenges along the way, and we are using DataHub to open these tools, infrastructure, and datasets to other developers.

DataHub's goal is to make it easy for more developers to start building with blockchain and Web3 technologies in three phases:

1. “No More Nodes” Gateway Access - We run a full node cluster with high availability so that developers can submit transactions and read raw chain data.

2. Higher-level analytics API - We continuously scan incoming blockchain data, compute analytics, and make enriched data available via an API.

3. App usage data - Developers can see the most popular sections of their app and get estimates of users and usage.

What are your hopes for how Figment’s tools and services can contribute to the early Filecoin ecosystem?

What we've done specifically for Filecoin is build a reputation system spec and API for storage miners. Essentially, this is a fixed API where we index the miners' data and allow anyone to build with it. It's similar to the data that powers Hubble, the explorer tool we've built for other networks as well as Filecoin.

With Hubble, we currently support 9 networks, such as Cosmos, Tezos, and NEAR, and by the end of the third quarter of this year, we should support about 10 to 12 networks. Our plan is that by the end of this year, Datahub can be used for about 10 networks.

Why Web3? How do you see the web developing over the next decade?

As the recent Twitter hack demonstrated, the importance of users controlling their data (hackers sent unauthorized tweets from popular verified accounts), the verifiability and authenticity of data will become critical. Web3 can succeed by linking communities together while preserving individual privacy.

Figment participated in Filecoin’s DevGrant program. Tell us more about your submission and what you’re building.

Our miner reputation system will provide further transparency to users on the Filecoin network. Users will be able to track performance and build profiles of storage miners. This will allow users to make more informed decisions when storing and accessing data in a safe and secure manner on the Filecoin network.

Beyond that, we plan to provide value to the Filecoin ecosystem by providing storage to the network, and we hope to build more tools in the future to make developing on Filecoin as seamless as possible.