# Filecoin the Storage Layer of Web3 | Molly Mackinlay - Filecoin

- Speakers: [Molly Mackinlay](https://streameth.org/speakers/molly-mackinlay)
- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 23:41
- Topics: blockchain, web3, ethereum, Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-zs6xPSit_5c
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs6xPSit_5c

## Description

Learn about the latest advancements for the Filecoin network, including integrations with Solana, and discover how decentralized data storage is the foundation for the next generation of the web.

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## Transcript

good morning friends oh this microphone is loud and I speak really loudly so I hope you guys are all excited to hear about some of the top themes for 2024 for filecoin which is the decentralized storage layer of web 3 we're just going to jump in and get started if you're not familiar with filecoin or what we're trying to achieve as the decentral decentralized storage layer for web 3 this is the filecoin master plan step one build the world's largest desent calized storage Network which we have done we actually did that in the first year um after filecoin mainnet which is very exciting we have thousands I think over 3,000 storage providers globally around the world um who are building on filecoin across 40 different countries um with 10 exobytes of storage capacity um step two was to onboard and Safeguard Humanity's data and we've been working on that you know very focused for the past couple of years um that continues to be a key Focus bringing many many different users and clients to store their data in filecoin and then step three which kicked off last year with the launch of the filecoin virtual machine is to bring compute to the data stored in filecoin to enable webscale applications to be using decentralized storage so just in the past year we've seen an immense amount of growth in the client data stored on filecoin um I think we're now at over two exabytes of data stored in filecoin which is just kind of a shocking um huge number and serving many many different clients from research to education to nonprofits who are storing their Dark Matter research data on filecoin cern's Atlas project is storing all of their nutrio nutrino data on filecoin and there's thousands of clients um and and data sets that are trusting filecoin with their their critical storage data um also I mentioned last year just just under a year ago um we launch launched the filecoin virtual machine this unleashes a whole ton of new capabilities for people to write smart contracts and applications that are orchestrating and programming the storage within filecoin um this is all evm compatible so you can Port your existing evm smart contracts to filecoin upgrade them with new filecoin storage capabilities um and start building new interesting applications that were never possible before because you couldn't offload storage into filecoin um we've seen a whole ton of really really cool applications being built um Lighthouse and uh nf. storage have been working on perpetual and automatic storage contracts where you can program the renewal of your data storage over time we have compute networks and gen networks um that are kind of monetizing data sets or Computing over data sets stored in filecoin um we have CDN that are doing fast efficient content retrieval from filecoin and we have really interesting defi loan markets which have been helping bridge the gap between filecoin token holders and filecoin storage providers who need collateral to secure their data in the filecoin network um and so we seen just truly massive unexpected growth we're now top 20 tvl of all chains um still growing at about 50% month over month which like we're almost a year in and we're still growing at that rate it's really really amazing um and you can see there's a a huge community of folks who are depositing file coins so that um storage providers can use that as collateral and many many over 872 storage providers who are borrowing filecoin um so that they don't have to build up a massive filecoin war chest before they can come and bring their capacity to the filecoin network to store client data um so I'm pretty impressed by that I think it's been some really amazing growth for the filecoin ecosystem um but really even more importantly than you know vanity metrics like tvl are the builders and partners who are bringing their applications and their capabilities into the Falon ecosystem there's over 200 teams that are building on filecoin across Bridges oracles staking exchanges and lots of really interesting data Dow or data oriented use cases as well um just some of the recent launches include Sushi Swap and Unis swap who have been bringing their dexes to the filecoin ecosystem um which kind of enables a lot of new kind of like cross chain or or or asset swapping applications in FM and again I think that this is going to continue growing massively um one of the things that fvm and that sort of capability unlocks is powering compute over data networks powering dpin networks and helping build new layer 2 networks that are building upon that fbm layer in filecoin so this unlocks a new phase previously we had filecoin as a storage network with fwm we kind of upgraded with new applications and new programmability and now this is unlocking a new wave of layer 2 scalable applications that are building on file coins storage and upgrading it with new capabilities compute capabilities um database and hot storage oriented capabilities retrieval capabilities um and a lot of these are building upon interplanetary consensus which is a a framework for building these planetary scale applications in filecoin um one of those actually has already launched uh I think a huge round of applause is is deserved for fluence who actually announced their main net on Tuesday as the first filecoin L2 building on IPC um the it's already live and out there which is [Applause] awesome um so if you haven't heard of interplanetary consensus it's a scalability solution specifically designed for large scale uh infra intensive applications uh it is designed to be highly scalable and hierarchically scalable so instead of you know everything's going to be an L2 and that's as far as we get as an ecosystem this is designed for recursive scalability and for subnets that are highly tunable they can be application specific they can have their own specialized built-in actors they can have their own consensus algorithms um and they can Shard uh progressively depending on their application specific needs so that might be having a gaming subnet that then has subnets within it for different games that could be having geographical region subnets where only nodes within a certain region are able to join that subnet thereby enabling you to have really fast block times because nodes are much closer together and able to um interoperate more quickly um and you can also have things like um you know deeper infrastructure Services one of the reasons you know we're coming to interplanetary consensus as a critical tool is that we've been working in this infrastructure Rich deepin Network space for years and years and years now FAL coin's been live for three and a half years as kind of the the first large scale dein Network out there um and so IPC is really designed and optimized for uh helping those networks come and scale very quickly and reach the sort of massive scale that infrastructure Ure networks need as they're growing um I mentioned that subnets are very very customizable um this is thanks to the kind of structure of the fvm as a hypervisor um I mentioned fvm is evm compatible that's because we literally have the evm running inside fpm's hypervisor as the first runtime um but you can add additional run times over time um Aqua VM is the one that's used by fluent and you can bring in additional run times as desired within different subnets you can deploy your own custom wasm actors FM is all wasm based under the hood um and so you can have specialized um wasm functions that you deploy within a specific subnet you can bring your own runtime you can bring your own native coin or token um and and it all has kind of your own configurable consensus layer within that as well so it's designed to be very configurable but it's also designed to make your life easy so you can get up and running quickly um this is really tuned for kind of large scale service networks um these are things like compute networks like fluence um that are already getting onboarded and then can interoperate smoothly with file coins network of thousands of storage provider nodes also running compute nodes right next to that existing storage so that they can run compute jobs over the storage in filecoin output the result of their compute jobs into filecoin storage and interrupt smoothly there but also things like hot storage layers cdns indexing engines retrievability networks and more so I really do want to celebrate the fact that we already have the fluence mayet that's building on top of IPC and building as a filecoin L2 and I want to um feed something for anyone else out here in the audience who might be working on you know prototyping their IPC Network or coming to filecoin is L2 the fluence team I think took a a great step forward from um kind of a public goods perspective committing 5% of their token Supply to funding public goods um as a retr pgf for developers who have been participating and contributing to things like filecoin and IPC and other building blocks um you can go and check this out you have to have public SSH keys on your GitHub profile in order to claim as a nudge uh so not everyone if you if you don't have that uh configured yet then you're not yet eligible for um this airdrop but I think it's a really great standard that we should be applying across all crypto ecosystems and especially for filecoin across all filecoin l2s um to set the standard that these networks are also contributing and giving back to the immense community of developers ecosystem Builders tooling providers infr providers that operate in this ecosystem this really should be the standard for all networks um so as we bring more and more deepend networks to filecoin more and more compute networks to filecoin um I think we should be uh in general creating this strong community and giving back mindset um that kind of helps tie these many many ecosystems together because many of them do get to share uh the capabilities and and new unlocks that they're bringing into this ecosystem all right so that was theme number one filecoin l2s powering compute over data and dpin networks um theme number two is filecoin as the storage layer for web 3 in particular um so this is you know looking at the data layer of blockchain architecture we already have Li P2P which is pretty standardized as your networking layer that's used by polygon and ethereum and polka dot and every filecoin and and every other blockchain Network um but really helping rebase all of web 3 um so that we're not having centralized AWS uh archives of all of our blockchain data and we're instead utilizing decentralized storage networks for that um as you might have seen earlier in the presentation um we've already seen massive adoption from kind of web to archival and research use cases um storing their massive very large scale data sets on filecoin CERN is I think the the largest data generator on the planet it's generating something like exabytes of data per year it's pretty cool um we're now talking about making sure that the tooling and the ease of use in filecoin isn't just tuned for very very large data archives but it's really tuned for web 3 developers and web 3 Chain archival Solutions um so that the web 3 ecosystem can be um efficiently relying on filecoin as its decentralized storage layer um I think there's a great example of this just from the past year um the Triton team Triton 1 worked very closely with um the Falin chain store team to onboard and and store all of the Sal salana chain State on filecoin there was this big frustration where whenever they had new nodes bootstrapping into the salana ecosystem or they're experiencing some chain instability and they needed to reload their chain from Genesis cost every node provider thousands of dollars to refetch all of the chain history from infura RPC apis um so that they could reload their nodes and validate their state from Genesis um and so there's an awesome collaboration here to load all of the salon chain archival State onto filecoin they structured it as an IPL graph so you can retrieve um subsets of that block data over time um and as you can see was was really well received as a great step forward and Exemplar for the entire web 3 ecosystem because this can now power and be a public good for entire blockchain communities um for things like you know powering RPC apis or or enabling indexing Solutions or enabling daps that just want to you know onboard index and and uh operate over top of historical chain State um so awesome awesome to see the reception of that um so we have we have a couple of chains that have already been uh onboarded in terms of their their blockchain state and history we have a couple of collabs work in progress with books been chatting with folks here ail near say and then we have some folks that that I have on my wish list as next up for who we plan to work with to bring their chain state to filecoin if you're excited to get yourself added to this next up list we'd be happy to collaborate with you um we kind of have a a three-step process right now of pulling all chain State and storing it in filecoin then doing a deeper dive uh IPL deification a structuring of your um chain data state to make it highly accessible and indexable um and then kind of the ongoing um you know Hook from uh like web 3 ecosystem to ongoing every block by block bring that into filecoin so we've talked about web3 chain state but what about the large scale data that isn't stored in the chain State itself but is highly interconnected and interoperating um and I think a great example of that is the larger scale dpin data that is being um created and referenced on chain um but isn't actually stored in chain State directly um and so the collaboration between textile Basin and weather XM is a great examplar there where they have all of this large scale weather data that's been being created um and textile Bas and work to index that onboarded on filecoin and is working on scaling that solution as a more decentralized layer 2 um style operation where you can just have kind of ongoing deepin data storage on filecoin um which helps make you know weather XM and these other deepin networks more robust and resilient and also lowers their costs for keeping all of this large scale um weather data around and accessible for their Community to build on and power their you know explorers and applications um so if you haven't heard of textile Basin yet there was a really great event yesterday called proof of data Summit where I think Mara gave a pretty good talk about um decentralized object storage um this is a a really exciting kind of new um Innovation if you know about uh table land which is also from the textile team it's a kind of like S3 database um indexing solution for things like mutable nfts um this is taking those same lessons of the kind of like bucket model and S3 API model and bringing that to filecoin arival solutions for dpin networks um and so this this team has a ton of experience in the space and I would really recommend if you are a de-pin network out there get in touch with the textile team they are actively looking for um early you know users that they can co-design the right apis and the most efficient solution with um we also have some really exciting work happening on the kind of storage aggregator L2 space so these are groups who are actually utilizing the same building blocks of IPC that are powering filecoin L2 compute networks and um and other networks to offer hot fast storage aggregation and caching for Network so um there's a a great team that's currently called w3s um or the decentralized web 3 storage team that's combining the ease ofuse developer apis um that many people have used in web3 storage um with the L2 content caching network of filecoin Saturn to create a hot fast um data storage object storage layer for smart contract developers or Builders who want um just like really simple smooth easy to use um hot storage apis to file coin um and it's utilizing all this same IPC technology to get up and started um a number of groups if you are a smart contract Builder and you want something that works and works well today Lighthouse has a lot of great um storage contracts that are already up and running they have proof of data inclusion in file coin Deals they have a lot of great like programmable access controls um and a lot of repair workers that allow you to do that configurable um I want this stored in this with this many different storage providers in these different regions and I want it repaired over time um and they're also leaning into that okay how do we utilize Technologies like IPC to help bring that as a hot storage layer for filecoin um and if you don't want to worry about any of that and you want more of the like you know custom partnership I just want to partner with an amazing group to help me get on boarded ban just opened their open Beta a couple of weeks ago um and they'll do kind of a more custom Deep dive onboarding partnership um with different groups and have a pretty slick um UI for storing data in fcoin so high level Point there's a lot of really amazing uh hot Storage Solutions focused on web 3 as an ecosystem um that are growing and improving themselves in the filecoin ecosystem right now and if you're excited about using them come talk to me and I will route you to the best one for you excited to make those connections all right so I'm almost out of time but can't can't leave you before also highlighting some of the amazing economic growth of the filecoin ecosystem as well we'd mentioned how defi was scaling um but also we have some really exciting work around new paid inbound activity in the filecoin ecosystem where we have more applications more users like all of these web 3 chains paying for their file coin storage at scale so that's um you know more export of value into the filecoin economy we also have a chunk of work right now on reducing Opex for groups like filecoin storage providers um and then defi is helping scale the number of internal businesses in the filecoin economy um and that's pretty awesome to see because this is helping um grow and scale um all of the the kind of like you know internal act uh ecosystem uh applications and use cases within fcoin um to highlight the three that I was mentioning here there's a lot of work right now Landing in the next Network upgrade that have um you know improvements specifically for storage providers in filecoin but there's a couple others that that generally kind of reduce Opex costs um for those participating in filecoin helping us devote more of our time and energy to Growing our applications directly um we have a number of paid users coming to filecoin I think the The Dore um onboarding flywheel just closed their first petabyte Enterprise paid storage deal um I think it was something you know at least five to five to eight um dollars per terabyte per month for uh a hot storage copy and an archival copy which is pretty awesome um and we have you know better and better retrieval metrics being used as well so that um users who want to uh expect hot fast retrievals from filecoin can um have a good reputation system for figuring out who to work with in the e e system um and then i' mentioned we have a number of dexes that are now live and the deos defi ecosystem in filecoin is just kind of booming in response to that um another enabling Factor we have coming up in Q2 is what we're calling um fast finality for filecoin or F3 which enables fast fast block times I think it's um single single block time finality within the filecoin ecosystem which enables much faster cross-chain bridging much faster user interaction and um interoperability with defi protocols you can get much faster confirmation times you can do um much much smoother interop between filecoin and other ecosystems so that's going to be pretty exciting both for say hot um fvm use cases that are pulling storage from other networks or for kind of more financial and defi oriented applications awesome well that's my highlight of the things that are happening in filecoin land excited to work with everyone here to make filecoin better together um and if any of you want to stick around a little bit longer you can come to the filecoin booth which is literally just right there um for a great AMA with Juan Benet the creator of filecoin um I think starting at 11:45 so in like less than 10 minutes so I'm happy to take a couple of questions if folks have them and then happy to chat with folks as we walk the 10 meters to the booth together um so thank you guys so [Applause] much anyone have any questions if so if you could come to the microphone that would be slightly easier so that the recording can hear you hello so uh a lot has happened in the last 10 years uh with protocol labs and filecoin I'm wondering uh it could be personal or professional what are you most proud of I think I'm I'm most proud of the amazing builders in the filecoin ecosystem there's just a really phenomenal community of all of the groups that are building tooling hot storage layers protocol improvements um it's just a pretty special Community everyone is very collaborative and friendly and and and innovating like building really we have like a number of L2 networks that are all um kind of going to Market in the next six months and those are folks who started from hackathons during the eth global hacks back in a summer of 2020 when everyone was in covid lockdown this group of Builders was getting together started to hack on filecoin even before filecoin main net launch had happened so think really really rough apis half of the things didn't work very well yet um and this group got started we now have applications like huddle 01 that got started in that hackathon um we have Lighthouse which I think got started either that year or the hacka Fest the year after that um and so there's just an amazing Builder community and that's I think what I'm most most proud of and you know what keeps me alive and thriving and happy in this ecosystem is getting to collaborate with all of those amazing folks um so if you are not yet in the Falin ecosystem and want to join the ranks of some really phenomenal humans come talk to me because that's also a thing that that I work on kind of at the core protocol Dev layer is helping more folks get onboarded involved and and making improvements to to filecoin to power their use case or their application um so that's that's what makes me happiest any other questions if not I will descend into the the ranks and what we can wand over to the the booth together um but thank you all so much appreciate it [Applause] okay