Original - Odaily
Author - Loopy
Editor - Hao Fangzhou
Investors who have a certain basic understanding of the crypto world must have heard of Filecoin. As a veteran project, the Filecoin protocol was proposed as early as 2014. This protocol is also one of the most well-known distributed storage networks currently.
In March this year, the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was officially launched. Since then, the Filecoin blockchain can now support smart contracts and user programmability through FVM. With FVM, developers can deploy smart contracts and plan how data will be stored, governed, and monetized in the open market.
Recently, Filecoin Dev Summit and Token 2049 were held simultaneously in Singapore. Odaily had the honor to interview Molly Mackinlay, the IPFSFilecoin Lead of Protocol Labs. This paper reviews the recent development of Filecoin and looks forward to its future development direction.
Molly Mackinlay, IPFS&Filecoin Lead
The following is a transcript of the interview, and the content has been edited.
FVM has been online for half a year. How is the data performance?
Odaily: It has been half a year since FVM was launched. How is its overall market performance? Can you provide some specific data?
Molly Mackinlay：FVM has been running since it went live in March this year, now 6 months old. During this time, Filecoin’s FVM has grown from a network that didn’t exist at all to now ranking 32nd on DeFiLlama with a TVL of approximately $80 million.
Thats impressive for a new network thats only six months old.
Currently, filecoin has been deployedNearly 3,000 smart contracts. Three of the most popular are GLIF, HashKing, and STFIL.
Designed to facilitate cooperation between token holders and storage providers, these protocols ensure that there is sufficient collateral to protect the storage capacity and data stored in Filecoin. Through these DeFi protocols, token holders can deposit FIL. Currently, 7.38 million FILs have flowed to storage providers through FVM. With the help of these FILs, they can ensure the security of the network while also helping them develop their own operations and the Filecoin ecosystem.
Previously, storage providers wanted more capacity and data but were unable to obtain sufficient FIL as collateral.
Therefore, these DeFi protocols have filled a very important gap in the ecosystem - we have more than2600+ unique token holdersParticipate in staking and receive rewards from storage providers. More than 300 storage providers already use these DeFi protocols.
Overall, there are currently a large number of things deployed on FVM, and the projects are sufficiently diverse.
Odaily: What are the current use cases for Filecoin?
Molly Mackinlay：So far, Filecoin has attracted a lot of storage capacity to the network. Over the past year, we have seen significant growth in the data stored on Filecoin.
Current storage customers include Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute(Odaily note: VCCRI is a prestigious Australian non-profit medical research institution dedicated to heart disease research), European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), University of California, Berkeley, etc.These institutions already store their data on Filecoin.
Odaily: What is Filecoin’s official roadmap? What’s the latest “big story”?
Molly Mackinlay：As a decentralized ecosystem,It’s hard to have any “official roadmap” for Filecoin. Because a lot of it happens quietly - there are so many different teams building.
At present, we are still investing more energy in three main areas:
Data retrieval: After data has been stored in FIL for a period of time, ensure that people can still retrieve the data from Filecoin with varying retrieval speeds, latencies, and frequencies. At the same time, provide good auditability and better protocols.
Filecoin now has a new feature - HTTP data retrieval. There are now CDNs being overlaid on top of Filecoin storage providers for faster data access. To date, the network has more than 3,000 search providers. They are working to attract customers who want to accelerate their content, as well as increasing customer adoption.
Computing power: Epik Protocol is currently running computingLayer 2 A test network built on Filecoin storage that performs computational work on data stored on Filecoin. Epik Protocol plans toMainnet launch early next year。
In 2024, we will see more new computing networks launched on top of Filecoin and implemented using L2 scaling technology. This allows it to store data and perform calculations, such as generative AI, distributed scientific data processing and other use cases.
Retrieval is an area that is accelerating, and computing will lay its foundation. The incentive program will be launched in the fourth quarter, and the mainnet will be launched in the first quarter of next year. In the second quarter of next year, there may be some other plans. I expect there will be many computing networks built on top of Filecoin.
Scalability: Leveraging our IPC technology (InterPlanetary Consensus). IPC is an L2 extension technology that allows new subnets to be differentiated from Filecoin. This could support the development of retrieval and computational networks, but could also support many other use cases such as data availability or other Web 3 infrastructure applications built on Filecoin.
IPC has already conducted prototype testing on the mainnet. It is still under construction and expanding in scale. A more general version will be launched at the end of Q4 this year or early Q1 next year.
Over the next six months, many new features and capabilities will be added to the network. This enables developers to build more Web3 networks on Filecoin and leverage the data stored in Filecoin as a foundation to support builders on this path.
Scalability: will have more than one L2
Odaily: Filecoin is known for its storage network, and FVM is a computing network. How to balance storage and computing? Where will Filecoin go in the future?
Molly Mackinlay：FVM makes Filecoins data storage more powerful, it extends and enhances Filecoin. Storage and computing are not either/or;Its not even competition.
FVM brings more value to existing Filecoin data stores. Users can see this in FVM deployed dApps. These DeFi protocols bring value to storage providers while helping token holders leverage their tokens within the network.
On top of FVM, some interesting data storage applications are being built.Examples include permanent storage, transactions across multiple jurisdictions, and long-term storage transactions that exceed baselines.These enhance interaction with the Filecoin storage layer, making it programmable.
I think it’s not one or the other, but the power of both.
The first runtime for FVM was the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), but the way we designed it was to bring many runtimes intoThe same super virtual machine systemmiddle. Therefore, we canUsing EVM and Wasm together(Odaily note: Wasm VM is another virtual machine commonly used in blockchain, different from EVM)。
This means that any developer in the ecosystem can bring their existing contracts into Filecoin and enhance their interaction with storage and connect them to the same runtime environment of other networks.
Filecoin hopes to work with the entire Web3 ecosystem, includingEthereum、CosmosandOther ecosystems. Filecoins infrastructure services bring strong support to Web2, such as AWS storage, computing, caching, data processing, etc. All of these should also be brought into different chains of Web3.
Odaily: Are there any areas where Filecoin is focusing its efforts?
Molly Mackinlay：FVM and the L2 network built on Filecoin are of great interest to many areas. We have compute layer tools like Epik Protocol that want to provide compute services alongside Filecoin storage. There are many other computing networks about to launch.
Additionally, there are a number of retrieval services that are happy to use L2 tools to track the retrieval incentives available in the Filecoin ecosystem.
FIL has fast block times and fast finality. But currently Filecoin’s block time is 30 seconds, up to 900 Epochs. This is still very slow for activities such as quick auditing, DeFi interactions, etc.
Every time a query is submitted to the system, fast response times are required. The IPC team has created a managed L2 on Filecoin and it is already online.
Developers can start building immediately. It provides block times of approximately 1 to 3 seconds and single Epoch finality. Therefore, it is possible for developers to provide a flexible user experience for users who build on top of it.
So I think beyond that well see a lot of other L2 applications like data availability, other Web3 infrastructure, etc. But Im very interested in expanding the entire Filecoin ecosystem through this path.
