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How is the IPFS ecology developing now?

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At the heart of the Filecoin ecosystem is the reinvention of the value of data

Article title: IPFS Ecological Comb

原文来源：B.E. Ventures

On April 9, 2014, at 2:02 am local time, Y Combinator received an application for a peer-to-peer hypermedia network protocol from a Stanford guy named Juan Benet. Also that summer, in a landmark event, ethereum's initial token was launched.

In 2015, amid anticipation, frustration and controversy, the IPFS protocol was born to challenge the old and massive HTTP decentralized in the name of interstellar. That year, Bittorrent, which once accounted for more than 40 percent of Internet traffic, seemed like ancient legend. But Juan Benet says, "the 21st century is the summer of point-to-point networking."

Three years in the making, Filecoin finally arrived on 15 October 2020, when the Filecoin mainnet launched on Block 148,888.In just one year, enthusiastic capital waves, developers, storage suppliers and massive data poured in crazily, and the computing power quickly exceeded 12EiB. More than 3,000 storage providers and more than 7,000 developers joined the ecological map with more than 450 projects.

October 15, 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of Filecoin's mainnet launch. On this memorable day, we tried to take stock of the ecosystem of Filecoin, and once again recall the words on the official website, "A decentralized storage network for humanity's most important information."

We believe that:

1At the heart of the Filecoin ecosystem is the reinvention of the value of data, including data ownership, data flow chain, data asset pricing and value flow methods.

2. Centralized storage and decentralized storage will coexist for a long time. Users who put experience first need more storage service integration platforms. Filecoin should further optimize the storage, retrieval, and other experiences.

3.The NFT track is Filecoin's natural advantage, more efforts should be made in the direction of community construction and user diversion.

4. Due to the design of the Filecoin economic model,There is a broad space for endogenous Defi to serve the assets and computing power of storage providers, and the NFT of lending business and computing power is worth further exploration.

5. Video is a hot track in the Filecoin ecosystem,Its lower-level encoding and decoding technologies and CDN construction need more decentralized exploration.

I. Ecological participants

Any ecological construction should serve the ecological participants. Filecoin's official white paper divides its construction participants into storage providers, users, token holders, and research developers. Taking into account the development laws of other public chains, the ecosystem on Filecoin can be theoretically divided into the following categories according to the development logic of underlying infrastructure -- the construction of underlying network -- and applications:

Serving storage vendors:As Juan Benet mentioned, attention should be paid to Defi requirements of storage providers, such as financial requirements for assets such as pledge, computing power, data, machines, etc. Projects such as Hashmix address current issues of storage providers borrowing funds and investors more flexibly participating in Filecoin power encapsulation.

Service storage users:Storage applications (SLATE, Space, ChainSafe Files), search applications (MYEL, Consensys, NBFS, etc.), transaction matching (Filwan), NFT storage (NFT) Storage), data economy (Wolfram, Ocean, FileHive, Ownership LABS, Numbers Protocol, etc.), Video/live (VideoCoin, Huddle01, NonEntropy) Tech, LivePeer).

Service Token Holder:Defi (Secured Finance, Atomica Script), cross-chain services.

Service Developer:Developer tools (Powerloom, TEXTILE, Fleek, Truffle, fission, Orbit DB, Nethereum, Valist, Infinite sroll, open RCP)

Ii. Key areas

1. Data value and ownership

Reviewing the traditional Internet's approach to data assets, it has experienced a process from business datamation to data businessization, in which business datamation is mainly for the needs of fine internal management of traditional enterprises, while data businessization involves data externalization for commercial use. There are several issues involved:

1. Unclear ownership of data assets;

2. Users' personal information is abused by the platform or stolen by a third party;

3. Data monopoly by large Internet companies;

Iv. The failure to establish an open and transparent data asset trading market, how to price data assets, the flood of false news and propaganda, intelligent push to build information islands, human algorithm alienation, the basic competition order and information fairness and justice have been seriously eroded, which runs counter to the spirit of the Internet.

In September 2018, Gavin Wood published an article, "why we need Web3", suggesting that Web3 is the only solution to these problems. If we go back 30 years to the World Wide Web,Web1 gathers information, Web2 connects human beings, And Web3 will reshape all values and promote the transformation of the Internet from information database to value warehouse -- returning to the essence of the Internet spirit.

What exactly is Web3?

No one can define it, not even Gavin Wood. When people actually describe Web3 in their mind,Decentralization, Ownership, Equality, SharingMust be a high-frequency keyword. What's really remarkable about Web3 is that it's determined by those who love to imagine it and those who love to build it, and there are an infinite number of possible visions of the future - all that is certain is that whatever Web3 is, the two key elements of computing and storage are the constant anchors.Filecoin is a decentralized storage solution that is inherently powerful against knowledge monopolies, algorithmic exploitation, and Internet oligopolies. It is Filecoin's mission to reshape the value of data and information.

1.1 Data Market

Defi ignited the Ethereum community, and NFT redefined "ownership." Whether ethereum or its ethereum sister chains, ethereum kill bracelets, the current capture of blockchain value is derived from transactions, i.e., financial data. Filecoin's focus on storage is supposed to break new ground beyond financial data.

While awareness of data ownership, data assets, the data economy, and changing consumer behavior is a long-term process, this should be the main direction of Filecoin's future and the foundation for more ipFs-only ecosystem applications.

At present, Ocean Protocol is one of the furthest and most beneficial explorations in the data economy.

Ocean Protocol builds a data marketplace on Filecoin. Data tokens can easily be used to publish and consume data services. At the same time, a decentralized exchange dedicated to data services, Ocean Market, has been established with tVL3.5 million and 456 pools. One pool represents a data set that can be purchased. At present, the most liquid pool is on-chain data, e-commerce data (consumer behavior data) and so on.

Additionally, Ocean Protocol forks an Balancer AMM to lower & NBSP; gas The cost. In this marketplace, users can publish, buy, sell, consume and pledge data. Through & have spent Filecoin, users can use Ocean To launch your own Filecoin data marketplace, or create one. Filecoin dataDAO Or index funds.

Filehive is another open source site for uploading, maintaining, buying, or donating datasets. Filecoin networks are used to incentivize storage and authorization of datasets that can be retrieved from IPFS networks. Data sets can be uploaded and maintained for viewing by users of the platform. These data sets can be anything: sports games, documents, financial data, public records, medical statistics, and so on. Individuals or institutions that upload datasets can choose to share them for free, or they can do so at NBSP; Filecoin also supports donation.

What does the Ocean Protocol teach us?

One is to capture, monetize and reconstruct data value using Defi logic, which may represent a trend of future data market.

The other one is how to define the data value, scarcity, timeliness, granularity, completeness, accuracy, have more structured, how many dimensions, application scenario of economic value, yes, the same set of data, is completely price discrimination for different consumers, and in need of dynamic pricing mechanism, we might as well to the market;

Third is the nature of the data commodity - is it more like ERC20 or ERC721? If the latter, data assets should be considered NFT.

1.2 Data Sovereignty

Giving everyone control over their data, as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, advocated; Make sure all information is transmitted correctly and not incorrectly; Complete information is conducive to political advertising transparency.

Some of the core qualities of Web3 are decentralization, resistance to censorship, and data sovereignty. Filecoin works with influential ngos, news media, and arts organizations to protect the flow and retention of humanity's valuable information.

Starling LABS is a research lab co-founded by the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California and Stanford University. Using the latest in cryptography and decentralized network protocols, Starling LABS stores the most unforgotten data and memories in human history. Dedicated to developing new tools that help reduce information uncertainty and create tamper-proof histories in digital media.At the heart of its solution is the Starling Framework, built on IPFS, which enables organizations to authenticate digital video and images using encryption technology and the capabilities of distributed systems.

Starling has three modules: capture, store, and verify. Working with Reuters to document the 78-day transition from The Trump administration to the Biden administration, reporters hashed the metadata instantly and sent all the information back to Reuters, creating an immutable chain of information to verify that each photo was indeed taken where and when Reuters claimed it was.

In addition, Starling LABS has cooperated with Taiwanese team Numbers Protocol to enable every user to create secure and verifiable digital assets to help users create tamper-proof records of media content. Currently, products such as Capture have been active for some time. The pain point of Capture is: If you are a photographer or illustrator, anti-plagiarism and anti-theft will become your daily routine, which is a tedious and helpless work, because it is difficult for them to trace or verify the pictures, and the lack of the right confirmation mechanism makes the creators lose many opportunities for realization.

With Capture, information such as ownership and shooting environment is recorded as soon as a photo is taken. The information is sealed on the blockchain, and within seconds, the photo is protected and ready to be cashed in. Even if others share and download images over the Internet, the information will still be tied to the photos, ensuring their traceability. In addition, protected photos can be sold directly from Capture's built-in, personally managed asset store without additional complexity.

Another interesting projectOwnership LABS, an open data marketplace for secure and verifiable private data computing, makes the chain of data flow transparent, thereby designing data service specifications that can be traced and aggregated hierarchically.The basic logic of the project, which is still under development, is that by accessing an asset template, users can define data sets to be shared and togenized, and then aggregate these data sets into unions. The data buyer can then track the data life cycle and run summary calculations.

1.3 Identity Authentication

Filecoin as a distributed storage solution offers a better way to explore decentralized identity in Web3 -- complete ownership, complete privacy, and greater convenience.

The current centralized architecture of the Internet has been plagued by identity privacy leaks from the ground up. Most recently, on October 4, Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp companies went down on a massive scale due to an incorrect instruction from engineers. The data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users, including names, emails, phone numbers, location, gender and user ids, is rumored to be for sale on a popular hacker-related forum.

Of course, decentralized identity is not necessary for blockchain, but it is an extremely important infrastructure for Web3, so to speak,The degree of development of decentralized identity authentication defines the existence form of participants in web3 network, which will directly affect the modes of participation and value distribution of various ecological systems.For example, in Defi, participants exist in the form of "address", so we are not ourselves, we are just a string of characters isolated in a single blockchain. We do not hold our assets completely, but our private key, which eliminates KYC, but also brings many problems: How can we do DAO governance better? How can we achieve "one person, one vote"? Why should we think that NFT really is wholly owned by us?

The conclusion is that decentralized identity authentication is the core of decentralized governance, Defi trust issues, and full ownership.

Microsoft's three-tier solution is probably the most fundamental and blockchain-based approach to decentralized identity. Microsoft has announced a partnership with IPFS, and Filecoin is expected to build on this approach.

ION -- Solution explored by Microsoft ION is a public identity network that provides a decentralized public key infrastructure through decentralized identifiers (diDs) and the Sidetree protocol at the top of the Bitcoin blockchain.ION was developed by a team of collaborators at Microsoft and the Decentralized Identity Foundation. The core of the scheme is stratification:

The protocol layer:Sidetree, which is deployed on networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum (currently only on the Bitcoin network);

Network layer:ION merges a large number of DID operations into an upchain operation by means of batch merging at Layer 2, and realizes the trusted storage of DID data by storing the data in IPFS and storing the data hash on the Bitcoin network.

Application layer:Generate unique identifiers and associated DID documents. The former is the tag of the latter, which contains information such as what DID can be authorized and in which services DID can be used.

Metaverse AI is a project hatched by the Filecoin Foundation to build a durable, trusted identity layer for Metaverse and the VR/AR universe based on the aforementioned Sidetree protocol.Real identity ownership is supported for cross-chain virtual experiences (including VR and Metaverse), while all data is distributed and stored securely to prevent data leakage.

2. Storage convenience class & NBSP;

Based on the current observation of the centralized exchange (CEX), we believe that during the transition from Web2 to Web3, the ultimate decentralization solution may not be the mainstream of the market, and users who are not sensitive to the concept of "decentralization" will pay more attention to ease of use, convenience and economy. Therefore, Web2.5 storage service providers like Pinata, Filebase and others will serve as a transition and bridge for some time. Users are not loyal to a chain, only to their own experience.

Pinata and Filebase serve as the customer entrance of the front end. According to the customer's preference, they can choose from Filecoin, storJ, Arweave, Amazon Cloud and other related storage supply service solutions to match the user's needs. For example, Filebase is compatible with Amazon S3 protocol.The cultivation of user habits is a long-term process. Decentralized storage needs to accelerate the transition to Web3 with lower storage cost, more convenient retrieval, smoother experience and stricter privacy protection.We will defeat the Leviathan who tries to control everything.

To make IPFS more user-friendly and make it easier for developers to build new projects, SLATE is based on Filecoin's open source storage system to upload, search, and share personal data. Chainsafe Files, by ChainSafe, is a highly secure, privacy-protected file storage service that provides an intuitive user experience.

Another key point is to greatly improve the matching efficiency between storage demand and storage service provider nodes, so that users can quickly find the trusted storage provider, and establish a sound system for the screening and selection of storage provider orders, such as Filswan. In addition, Juan Benet mentioned the concept of storage Auction house for many times. He said that he liked this idea very much. According to the stored content, storage nodes will be auctioned, and the highest bidder will be awarded.

3. The NFT storage & have spent

Juan Benet once said:"NFT that is not stored on IPFS is not really your NFT."

NFT itself needs a large amount of storage space. At present, the way of storing transaction records on the chain and media (pictures/videos etc.) on the chain is usually adopted. Many centralized NFT Marketplaces, while leveraging decentralized storage such as Filecoin, actually host these files as nodes through the Marketplace's own private gateway. For now, marketplace maintains the relevant nodes. Although no such event has occurred, if the relevant marketplace stops maintaining the relevant node, will the NFT be lost? This goes against the core of full ownership of NFT.

If I want to buy and own an NFT outright, I should have a transaction record that can never be tampered with, and a storage node that I maintain entirely myself.

For example, IF I purchased a crypto cat in OpenSea, I could destroy the NFT hosted by OpenSea for me with one click and re-create a completely consistent version on IPFS -- it would be all mine.

Or at the very least, there should be an endogenous NFT project within the Filecoin ecosystem that allows one-click casting and trading of NFT, such as protocol LABS 'NFT Storage. At the same time, with the help of Fandom economy, well-known IP fragmentation is introduced to accelerate the booming of NFT market. For example, Curio Digital project uses IPFS to tokenize well-known IP. They've already done deals with TV show American Gods, graphic novel brands Concrete Park and Heavy Metal. The team is in talks with Universal Music for deals with Metallica, Paul McCartney and the Grateful Dead, as well as a Bond movie franchise.

Endogenous Defi 4.

Because Filecoin package prepledge and delayed release features, resulting in a higher threshold of computing power and relatively high capital costs. Addressing the liquidity needs of these storage provider assets becomes an essential part of the Filecoin ecosystem.

Interest rates are at Defi's heart, and the stars of the circuit include Secured Finance, a platform for peer-to-peer fixed-rate lending, collateral management services, cross-asset swaps and more. Atomica Script is an automated insurance market platform for decentralized finance, and Canza, a project for sub-Saharan Africa that provides financial services to local currency brokers.

Computational Defi is another area worth exploring in the Filecoin ecosystem.Filecoin proposes a zero-knowledge proof approach to solving the problem of decentralized validation for large-scale storage, but this approach is computation-intensive, making the cost of storing data for applications more expensive than projects like storJ, and shutting out a large number of small storage devices entirely. How to leverage Defi's thinking to bring the massive computing power of the Filecoin ecosystem to life? Juan Benet once proposed the idea of Hardrive Futures, Hashmix once did the construction of computing force Defi,Through the NFT of computing power, the demand among investors, lenders and storage providers of computing power can be combined with the launch of deposit-loan packaging products, essentially improving the liquidity of computing power.

5. Video/Live streaming & NBSP;

With the development of hypermedia, the development of information media from text and pictures to video is an irreversible trend. Also think about the trajectory of NFT hotspots. Avatars, JPG images, code, TXT documents, music, and video may be next. How many ETH can an NFT of Marilyn Monroe's birthday wish song be auctioned? How much should an NFT of Chaplin's silent film be worth? Forbes has a column on what to expect from video NFT, mentioning the VideoCoin project, which has integrated with Filecoin to build the first NFT dedicated to creating and trading video.

Voodfy is another decentralized video platform that allows creators to host and monetize content in their own way, benefiting individuals and companies that are eager to monetize their knowledge but worried about piracy affecting their revenue.

Filecoin is also concerned with poor Internet infrastructure and uneven educational resources in less developed countries. Online video education is an area of exploration, such as Huddle 01, an online classroom platform optimized for video conferencing participation, and NonEntropy Tech, an Indian team. A video-centric online learning platform.

Video itself has huge requirements for storage, memory and bandwidth, leading to its innate preference for centralized solutions. Research reports show that users' tolerance for video lag is far lower than that of other information media, such as text and pictures. Users can wait five seconds for the picture to load, but it is difficult to tolerate video lag for one second from time to time. Filecoin's efforts at the track require more decentralized thinking to solve technical problems, as well as exploring Web3 infrastructure.

For example, the issue of content delivery efficiency should be addressed. The MYEL project, supported by the Filecoin Foundation, focuses on building a decentralized content delivery network for Web3.

Secondly, the problem of encapsulation encoding and parsing,Livepeer is an idea that distributes the coding task to nodes on the network. The nodes get rewards by mortgaging the token and completing the coding task, and then provide services to terminal video users. Users can obtain Livepeer token by performing video transcoding"Is currently being implemented as ethereum smart contracts, hosted by Swarm, and will be connected to the Filecoin network in the future. In addition, it is necessary to design better community incentive mechanism to add quality content and attract more excellent creators, such as KOL and online celebrity anchors in traditional networks, token incentive and reward mechanism for creators, and better realization of traffic realization. Lino Network and Theta are good examples.

5. 6. Smart refrigerator

Looking at ethereum's trajectory, the ecosystem is largely a developer-driven upward spiral, with more app innovation attracting more users and more resource investment, thus siphoning off more talented developers and creating a better and more comprehensive ecosystem. Many projects in Filecoin ecology are convenient for developers, such as TEXTILE, Truffle, fission, Orbit DB, Nethereum, Valist, Infinite Sroll, open RCP, Ganacha, etc. For example, lightweight API, universal protocol and one-click deployment can make developers pay more attention to the breakthrough of core technology, optimization of smart contract and improvement of business logic.

Powerloom is another interesting project that addresses the trust issue of Defi smart contracts. We benefited from the idea of Lego, a lot of 1+1 greater than 2 innovation, but it also brought some problems, such as Defi development complexity, Defi smart contract complexity, developers need to spend a lot of time to verify.

Powerloom creates snapshots with proof of encryption in a decentralized manner by aggregating on-chain and off-chain data, storing the snapshot data from the protocol as hot on IPFS, and anchorting it on the Filecoin network, Build trust and provide meaningful insights based on needs by motivating a rich ecosystem of peers and stakeholders participating in the agreement.

conclusion

Filecoin's one-year anniversary on the main web. It was a year in which preachers of Internet freedom, victims of value monopolies, opportunists and idealists rose and fell in the noise, values and bubbles. But whoever looks up at the dot-com boom at the end of the century, at the hard-drive busts after the collapse of Bittorrent, if he happens to believe in the spirit of the Internet, data sovereignty and the open web, if he values anti-censorship and anti-trust, servers, closed source, winner take all or Facebook, Should be defined as a section of the Internet astray.

Filecoin is one year old, and fortunately we've decided the future we're headed for, and we're going to recast everything about value. The Internet is always saving itself.