Take you to understand Filecoin's interoperable network!!!

Interoperability is defined on Baidu as the ability to coordinate distributed control system devices through digital exchange of relevant information to achieve a common goal. Traditionally, interoperability refers to the ability to exchange and share data between different platforms or programming languages.

Currently, the official team has announced that Filecoin can display four interoperable nodes:

Although these four Filecoin implementations are not yet feature-complete, they are actually close. Lotus and Go-Filecoin will achieve network interoperability in the coming weeks. Interoperability with Fuhon and Forest will be achieved shortly. Miners can track the progress of each implementation in the individual client implementations on GitHub.

Multiple implementations of interoperability mean that the four different nodes of Filecoin can not only achieve their respective goals, but also share data with each other, complement each other's strengths, and jointly promote the strength of the main network.

In October 2019, the Filecoin blog "Announcement of Filecoin's first implementation network "Lotus"" mentioned the importance of multiple client implementations.

The blog mentions that building a blockchain is like building a software rocket. To ensure the security of the protocol and software implementation – Protocol Labs has an internal protocol security team and is performing internal implementation security audits, external security audits, etc. However, no matter how hard the team works to protect the system and individual nodes, there are always implementation errors that may have adverse consequences for the network.

Having multiple software implementations that interoperate on the same network can significantly reduce this risk. While each implementation has its own set of bugs, it is unlikely that all implementations will have exactly the same set of security issues - especially if those implementations do not share security-critical software components. Therefore, launching a cryptocurrency network with multiple implementations reduces the likelihood of a catastrophic bug that could adversely affect or even take down the entire Filecoin network.

For example, when the client implementation written in go-filecoin is attacked, the Fores client implementation written in Rust may be able to resist the attack and run stably, so as not to paralyze the entire Filecoin network.

Multiple implementations also have other benefits, such as increased ability to engage with different developer communities, and the opportunity to explore different implementation architectures (which may offer different performance and other optimizations).

In addition to the interoperability between the four Filecoin nodes, some community members are also curious about whether IPFS and Filecoin can interoperate.

In response, Juan, the founder of Filecoin, replied: "Filecoin nodes are IPFS nodes, but they use different code bases than Go-ipfs. So they will be able to connect, because all libp2p can, through Filecoin can lock and retrieve content in any IPFS network. We will edit more content about how it works specifically."

Filecoin and IPFS complement each other. Only by ensuring interoperability can the protocol and distributed storage trading market continue to operate healthily and stably.

Filecoin can lock and retrieve any content in the IPFS network, which means that as long as the IPFS project can be grafted with Filecoin, Filecoin can retrieve data on all IPFS applications. Currently, there are more than 130 IPFS projects, and the source of Filecoin data will continue to increase based on IPFS applications.