“During the ‘K-pop & Filecoin Day in Korea’ event, held as part of Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul on August 12, 2022, Protocol Labs Founder and CEO Juan Benet was featured in an interview video. The event and interview can be viewed in their entirety in the video and recap of the event.”
◆ Community effort to grow Filecoin
Currently, many teams are working on various things related to Filecoin, such as developing storage networks, how retrieval works, how computing is run, and FVM. As we can see, over the past few years, we’ve been trying to build massive capacity, and finally, it’s big enough to compete with large centralized providers.
Over the past year, we have been working hard on onboarding a lot of data, helping and supporting various applications built on top of Filecoin to build new storage use cases. As a result, many types of applications, such as music and video players, metaverse applications, game and document systems, and personal file storage tools are built on top of Filecoin, and a lot of data is flowing into the network.
Many search projects coexist, such as ‘Saturn’, a so-called Filecoin-based CDN, ‘Network Indexer’, where a storage provider indexes content and then supports search, and FVM (Filecoin Virtual Machine) which can perform programmability tasks through data stored in Filecoin, is about to be released.
◆ When to use retrieval networks?
In addition to Saturn, there are also networks such as Myel and Titan, and various search networks will be launched in the future, each tailored to slightly different use cases, allowing additional incentive flows to be imagined. We are currently testing a variety of search networks using large traffic volumes.
◆ How do Storage Providers and Retrieval Providers benefit economically?
In the Saturn model, publishers will pay for the CDN, and search providers will start with an incentive structure based on publisher payouts, paying a commission for every request they serve. The ultimate goal of this model is to pin specific content to a specific region, which is why it provides an incentive.
◆ On recent climate change issues
Climate change is a huge problem that affects humans all over the world, and it is something we all need to work on and improve. I think it is important to decarbonize certain industries to show other industries, and to set an example for other industries later.
‘People are working on Filecoin Green are working to make a positive impact on the climate, rather than being utterly carbon-neutral with Web3, starting with Crypto. Simply put, it can be implemented through verifiable claims and types of carbon credits, renewable energy credits through Web3, etc., as extracting and fixing carbon from the earth.
One of the really cool and interesting things about Web3 is that it provides mechanism design directly from the blockchain. This means you can create transactions that combine more complex functions with more complex operations. Various converged transactions are possible, for example, by measuring the network's total energy consumption, purchasing renewable energy credits from a renewable energy plant that produces renewable energy, and connecting with a storage provider.
We have a dashboard of what energy we use and estimates across all the different energy grids and have purchased renewable energy certificates. This certificate should be able to account for all the energy used by the storage providers. We will also work harder to get a computing network that is very climate-positive.
◆ Current IPFS and Filecoin position in Web3 space
That’s a good question. First, IPFS is a method of thinking of the content of Web3 as a network that addresses and moves, so you can use CID to address all data and files, specific data structures and objects, etc., and then use Filecoin. For backing up data and services to others, including long-term storage or fast CDN delivery, we want the Filecoin network to be a useful service for all users.
So we want solid connections and bridges to all other robust blockchains. The goal is for all workers building smart contracts and applications for any network or chain to back up all content directly to Filecoin.
Only actual storage usage this year exceeded 100 TiB. For transactions, there is 140 PiB of storage in actual use. This is an astonishing number. It is in the top category for storing all content generated by Web3 applications on a scale much more significant than next-generation centralized storage networks.
It is also the only network capable of handling moderately web-scale workloads. Large-scale applications like TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter require exabytes (EB) of storage space and massive amounts of computation. Only networks like Filecoin can handle this kind of usage. A lot of work is now required to support applications such as computer pipelines of all kinds. It should make application development easier. That’s what we’ve been thinking about.
Timo Lee:
In the future, we want to share data through the Filecoin network, which is currently controlled by a centralized service provider, such as K-contents, dramas, movies, and entertainment. Most of the revenue goes to centralized service providers, and we want this to go back to community content creators and artists, not only to service providers. This will be a great use case in the future.
◆ Last thing Juan wants to say
Thank you so much for inviting me, and it is a great honor to share so many stories with you. Finally, I want to ask Korean community members to bring one new person to the Filecoin community every month. Simply invite, think of it as bringing in a new friend. They may later become developers, storage providers, or retrieval providers. I want to grow Filecoin into a global community in a new area. That way, we can build a stronger community in the space.
About Juan Benet:
An American computer scientist who invented IPFS and Filecoin. He is the founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, a computer networks research and development company. He is best known for creating the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), an open-source, peer-to-peer, decentralized web protocol, and Filecoin, a crypto-incentivized file storage network.
About Timo Lee:
A Berlin-based Community Lead for Secured Finance. He is helping spur financial innovation in the Filecoin community. An early follower of IPFS and Filecoin technology, he’s driven to help provide access to emerging financial markets and business opportunities in crypto.
Supported by Filecoin Foundation #Orbit Program
