Filecoin and Ethereum: Close but distant good friends

Yesterday, ConsenSys Labs and Protocol Labs jointly launched the Techyon accelerator project, which aims to implement the application of Filecoin. In the first phase, the project will support 15 to 20 startup teams to use IPFS or Filecoin to implement Ethereum projects for file sharing and website construction.

Note the following keywords: Ethereum, IPFS/Filecoin, and application acceleration. Protocol Labs and the ConnsenSys team are also mentioned.

Readers who are familiar with Filecoin and IPFS are no strangers to Protocol Labs, and readers who are familiar with Ethereum should also be familiar with the ConsenSys team. This is a heavyweight Ethereum application support team with very strong strength. It was established with the birth of Ethereum and has always played a pivotal role in the Ethereum application community.

The combination of IPFS/Filecoin and Ethereum will open another door for blockchain applications, allowing blockchain applications to break through the current limitations of only financial-related light data applications and allow more data-related applications to be implemented. The opening of this door is the real opening of Web3.0.

This time, each selected team will receive $80,000 in cash support. If you are interested, please apply now.

The Ethereum team/foundation and the IPFS/Filecoin development team - Protocol Labs have a long history of cooperation, and the cooperation is comprehensive. On the one hand, both teams attach great importance to the breakthrough theoretical research of blockchain, follow the consistent thinking from research to engineering, and are very compatible in temperament. Therefore, many people in the research and development departments of the two teams are friends, and they often meet and discuss together. On the other hand, the technologies and applications of both parties are complementary to a certain extent, and the implementation of blockchain applications is most powerful when the two are combined.

Prior to this collaboration with ConsenSys to support applications, the ongoing HackFS project was also jointly initiated by ETHGlobal, an important Web3 community, and Protocol Labs. This is a one-month hackathon, which is also aimed at supporting the application development of Ethereum + IPFS/Filecoin. It also provides more than $125,000 in bonus support.

It is reported that Protocol Labs is still making extensive arrangements, and more cooperation will surface before and after the mainnet is launched. Developers who hope to participate in this ecosystem can apply for funding to start quickly.

In fact, in the entire Ethereum ecosystem, there are countless projects that use IPFS. It can be said that most Ethereum applications that contain data use IPFS. You can find relevant tutorials by just searching on the Internet, and you can also develop a smart contract that combines IPFS.

As for the Ethereum team and Protocol Labs, the cooperation is more on the technical level. The cooperation in this aspect is comprehensive, including:

• Research on VDF (Verifiable Delay Function): Since both Ethereum 2.0 and Filecoin use the POS consensus mechanism, a very important foundation of the PoS consensus is verifiable delay. Although there is no ideal solution so far, the joint research between Protocol Labs and the Ethereum Foundation since the beginning of 2019 has made many breakthroughs. For a period of time, the two parties considered jointly developing VDF hardware and did a lot of exploration, but the technology was not yet mature. The cooperation is still continuing.

• Research cooperation on consensus mechanism: The security issue of PoS is crucial. Both Ethereum and Filecoin have encountered such problems. Because it is different from PoW, how to be fair and secure? How to simplify the design. Filecoin adopts expected consensus, and Ethereum 2.0's PoS will also consider Filecoin's adoption of GHOST (the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree) fork aggregation mechanism to achieve chain stability.

• Adopt Libp2p: Libp2p is an important module in the IPFS project, which implements a set of standards for peer-to-peer networks. Ethereum2.0 has determined to use Libp2p to connect and communicate between chain nodes. Libp2p is of course also the network layer used by Filecoin. Of course, Libp2p also provides support for many other chains. For the security of Ethereum2.0 and Filecoin networks, Libp2p has made many efficiency and security improvements in the past year.

Three years ago, there was a rumor that Filecoin would be implemented directly on Ethereum. Of course, this is impossible. However, it reflects the voice of some communities. Ethereum's vision is to be a world computer, and Filecoin is to establish a decentralized storage market to achieve decentralized data storage and retrieval. However, we know that an application requires a combination of computing and storage. Naturally, wouldn't it be better if these two parts were implemented on one chain? Yes, this is an option, and it is not impossible. Let's consider a few aspects:

1. Verifiable random numbers

   Currently, Filecoin has abandoned the original practice of relying entirely on tickets generated on its own chain to obtain random numbers. Instead, it uses the DRAND chain to provide random numbers. DRAND is relatively simple and distributed, but it is not completely decentralized. This is a constraint for the decentralized Filecoin.

   Since Ethereum 2.0 is about to use the beacon chain, which is decentralized and runs very fast. Since Filecoin needs to use an external random number, isn’t it better to use Ethereum’s beacon chain? It’s very good.

   A slightly troublesome problem is that if you want to directly use Ethereum's beacon chain to obtain random numbers, you need to include an Ethereum client in the Filecoin implementation, which will make the code heavier.

2. Smart Contracts

   If Filecoin only provides a storage market, it will be difficult to fully realize its potential. For some data applications, the key is data, and the actual computing requirements are very small. If Filecoin can provide smart contracts, computing and storage can be realized on the same chain. For example, small things such as evidence storage and authentication will be very simple to do on Filecoin.

   Wouldn’t it be great if Ethereum’s virtual machines could run directly on Filecoin nodes? Or is Filecoin compatible with or borrowed from Ethereum’s virtual machines?

   This should be the next step for Filecoin to take.

3. Sidechains and Sharding

   As a storage market, its processing speed may become a bottleneck for application development. Ethereum has done a lot of exploration, and the implementation of Shading is gradually advancing. In this process, can the combination of Filecoin and Ethereum be closer? The current Ethereum+IPFS application cannot be separated from the maintenance and operation of application developers, and has not achieved complete automation. So if Filecoin and Ethereum can be combined through a bridge, such as using side chain technology or sharding technology. Completely decentralized data-related applications can be naturally realized.

As mentioned above, Filecoin implements user-customized smart contract functions, which makes Filecoin self-contained and can independently support DAPP. In this way, it seems that Ethereum has nothing to do with it.

In fact, as far as the Filecoin network is concerned, due to the need for data-related processing, key replication proofs and time-space proofs, the computing power of the entire Filecoin chain is greatly reduced compared to Ethereum. However, in terms of data management capabilities, it is superior.

Therefore, we can imagine that as Filecoin gradually develops and matures, and Ethereum 2.0 gradually improves, more and better applications will be implemented, and these applications may choose different chains to carry them according to their own characteristics.

The ecosystem of Web3.0 is huge, and there should be a situation where a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.