What
Filecoin is building open services for data
Filecoin's vision is built around three core pillars: storage, retrieval and transformation of data.
The goal is to form a credible alternative to the legacy cloud infrastructure, that matches it in scale and suite of data services.
There are three core pillars of Filecoin
An open market where individuals and organizations can contract with storage providers to store their data.
The Filecoin community started with Storage Markets as the first step. As data has gravity, starting with Storage makes it easier to build Retrieval and Compute over the data.
An open market where individuals and organizations can contract with retrieval providers to deliver content.
This unlocks the universe of use cases which need faster retrieval speeds, such as video streaming.
Learn more and follow our progress at Retrieval Market.
An open market where compute power can be contracted to run over data.
This is a growing topic of interest given the immense amount of compute resources needed for AI models. Filecoin's vision includes different subnets emerging specializing in different kinds of compute jobs.
Learn more and follow our progress at Cod.cloud.
Key protocol upgrades to enable these services include Smart Contracts (the Filecoin Virtual Machine) and Scaling (Interplanetary Consensus).
Why
Why Filecoin, why now?
A bet on decentralized physical infrastructure networks
Filecoin is a bet on decentralized physical infrastructure networks being a more effective way to coordinate the provision of cloud services in a growing data economy.
Crypto-economic incentives showing success
The crypto-economic incentives of Filecoin have successfully coordinated globally-distributed parties to bootstrap hardware to the network, resulting in rapid growth of storage capacity (exbibyte scale) at a lower cost.
Huge market opportunity
The market opportunity is massive, as the global cloud services industry is projected to grow to 1 trillion USD by 2028. Macro trends of big data and artificial intelligence further support Filecoin’s potential.
Tokenomics designed for long-term alignment
Filecoin’s tokenomics are designed to reward long-term participation and contribution to the network. Further improvements to the protocol may lead to increasingly valuable use cases for the network and the token.
FVM: How It Works, What Use Cases It Unlocks, and Why It Matters
March 9, 2023
This blog post explains what Filecoin’s Virtual Machine (FVM) is, why it matters, and how one might evaluate...
Business Models on the FVM
Dec 13, 2022
The Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) allows us to compose these services together, along with other on-chain services...
Filecoin Tokenomics: Understanding an Advancing Economy
Oct 28, 2022
The Filecoin network launched in October 2020, introducing an incentive layer to the IPFS protocol and enabling open services...
