Filecoin’s larger roadmap aims to turn cloud services into permissionless markets on which any provider can offer their services. The network started with Storage markets, with the Mainnet launch in October 2022. More recently, the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was introduced to bring smart contract functionality onto the network. This allows for user programmability around key services on the Filecoin network: which includes Large-scale Storage, and soon, Retrievals.

In this post, we dive into the Retrieval markets that Filecoin is developing and one of its lighthouse projects. We will cover the following topics:

• Filecoin’s Retrieval Markets and the Retrieval Markets Working Group (RMWG)
• Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and the role of Project Saturn
• Saturn’s approach to a decentralized CDN and its traction to date
• What’s next for Saturn

Filecoin’s Retrieval Markets and the RMWG

As covered earlier in our previous post, Filecoin seeks to build open services for data, which consists of three main pillars (Storage, Retrieval, and Compute-over-Data). Storage has been a key emphasis for Filecoin from 2020 to 2022 — it has emerged as the largest decentralized storage network to date, with over 1,170 PiB of data stored, and 200,000+ users ranging from Opensea to the Internet Archive. The remaining pillars of Retrieval and Compute-over-Data have been in development since 2022, with working groups (open for any individual or entity to join) organized around building these markets. The working groups encourage modularity and often consist of different teams that tackle different pieces of the puzzle.

The Retrieval Market Working Group (RMWG) is centered around building a decentralized CDN (Content Delivery Network) for the Filecoin ecosystem. Over 15 teams (such as Magmo, Ken Labs, Protocol Labs, and more) are contributing to tackling technical challenges in the space, from enabling ultra-fast payments to data transfer protocol enhancements to crypto-economic models for data retrieval. The following are building blocks the RMWG has been organizing itself around since H1 2022 and is built off an envisioned retrieval flow that can interact freely with Filecoin’s storage markets.

Even in its R&D stage, projects in the RMWG are already serving 160 million daily retrieval requests and more than 2 PB of data per month. Collectively, these projects will seek to enable a decentralized CDN that can serve not just the web3 space, but the web2 market as well.

CDNs and the role of Project Saturn

Content delivery networks are a key part of the Internet’s infrastructure. Groups of servers work together to provide fast delivery of internet content, from static web pages to YouTube videos. Incumbent CDN providers include players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastfly. Businesses pay for these services instead of the end-user, which means that service consistency, coverage, and pricing are critical.

The CDN market today is highly centralized and dominated by a few big players. Only 7 CDN providers serve over 80% of market needs. This brings about sizable concentration risk in the event of network failures (e.g. CloudFlare outage in 2022), and higher latencies in regions far remote from the closest data centers (e.g. Africa).

A distributed model of smaller CDNs in various regions could effectively solve these problems, but economies of scale have prevented smaller, distributed CDNs from challenging incumbent providers (capital outlay could reach up to billions per year). Delivering web content better than incumbent providers will open up a significant commercial opportunity. The global CDN market size accounts for US 20Bn in 2022 and is expected to reach around 100Bn by 2032 (not counting new web3-based use cases such as NFTs). This is where Project Saturn comes in.

A web3 CDN can potentially overcome this challenge by allowing anyone to contribute resources for content retrieval (provided they fulfill minimum criteria) in a network. This shifts the burden from a single company to thousands (or more) of companies supporting the network, reducing barriers to entry. This is where Project Saturn comes in. Project Saturn is a decentralized CDN network built on Filecoin, that seeks to enable reliable, performant, and economic retrieval of content on the Internet. It is one of the key projects in the RMWG, with a public launch in November 2022. Saturn seeks to achieve the following:

• Democratize the CDN market, by allowing anyone to serve as a Saturn node operator in return for crypto-incentives. Nodes can join in a permissionless manner, allowing for multiple companies or individuals to contribute towards a retrieval network (think franchising), which leads to a wider and more distributed footprint
• Performant retrievals, with under 100ms TTFB, high network bandwidth, and low latency across all geographies, owing to a high density of nodes being distributed across each continent. While this does not exist today, it can potentially be achieved given a wider geographic distribution of nodes
• No single point of failure unlike traditional CDN networks
• Data integrity and authenticity by leveraging content-addressability. Project Saturn is the only decentralized CDN that is natively compatible with content-addressing

Saturn approach and traction to date (Aug 2023)

The data below is accurate as of August 2023, unless otherwise stated. Data for number of Active Nodes are accurate as of November 2023, owing to a upgrade in October 2023 that removed multi-noding behavior in the network, while keeping TTFB performance stable.

While Saturn’s ambition is to serve as a credible alternative to traditional CDN networks, its near-term goal is to effectively fulfill the billions of requests received each week for content-addressed data on Filecoin and IPFS. This is currently being fulfilled by IPFS Gateway, which serves as a key benchmark for Saturn as it improves its network capacity and performance.

Saturn’s approach involves four main network actors in enabling retrievals from Filecoin and IPFS:

1. Node operators offer their hardware and resources to the Saturn network by running Saturn nodes in different geo-locations around the world. They are rewarded based on how many bytes they serve to clients over each payment epoch. Saturn nodes join the network by registering with the Saturn Orchestrator. The network of Saturn L1s provides a huge geographically distributed cache of content-addressed data for Saturn clients
2. Saturn Orchestrator manages the membership of node operators in the Saturn Network and facilitates the payment process to these nodes. This is a key function in democratizing data retrievals while ensuring that qualified participants enter the market. Over time, the aim is for the orchestrator to run entirely on theFilecoin Virtual Machine (FVM)
3. Clients: Network users make requests for content from the Saturn network. The Client is the device used to make the request. Clients make HTTP requests to the Saturn network and get back CAR files, allowing clients to verify the file incrementally. When a Saturn L1 doesn’t have a file in its cache, it “cache-misses” to wherever the file is stored in either the IPFS Network or the Filecoin network, and returns it to the client
4. Customers use the Saturn Network as a CDN to accelerate their content to their users. Saturn customers can accelerate their content to a large number of Saturn nodes around the world to create a performant experience for end users

Significant developments have been made on Project Saturn to date. Following its public launch in November 2022, Saturn now has 80ms Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) at the 50th percentile, serves 30% of mirrored traffic from IPFS.io via the Bifrost Gateway, and has launched a verifiable node reward payout system on FVM.

It also has made significant headway in developing a network that is geographically diverse, capable of handling high-volume requests, and able to deliver content in a performant manner (low time-to-first byte). Since its public launch (just 8 months), Saturn has achieved:

• Over 2,000 global points of presence (across 59 countries)
• Capacity to serve 478 Million requests each day (in July 2023)
• 80 milliseconds time-to-first-byte (TTFB) for IPFS content

1) Over 2,200 retrieval providers worldwide (comparably distributed to traditional CDN providers)

Over 2,200 retrieval providers are currently on Saturn contributing to network bandwidth. This is a strong 11.8% MoM (month-on-month) growth, starting with only 662 nodes at the end of 2022. As a point of comparison, Filecoin’s storage markets grew by 21% MoM in its first 6 months, with approximately 3,500 storage providers on the network today (the largest in the web3 storage space)

This is comparably distributed to traditional CDN providers today. Akamai, the largest CDN globally, with a 35% market share, also has over 4,000 points of presence globally, while the next closest player (Alibaba) has only an estimated 2,800 points of presence (with the majority in China).

This speed of growth attests to the accessibility of serving as a retrieval provider on the Saturn network. It takes only 4 terabytes (TB) of storage and Saturn’s open-source software to run a Saturn CDN node (considerably less resource-intensive than being a storage provider on Filecoin). Saturn will allow more individuals to participate in Filecoin’s decentralized markets for data services.

Participation across geographies remains diverse: with the most nodes in Europe (800+), followed by North America (600+), and Asia (500+). Median TTFB remains consistently low across all continents, with Europe, Asia, Oceania, and South America experiencing sub-100 ms TTFB.

Distribution of these nodes is important, as it allows for the lowest possible distance between clients and nodes, translating to low latency for end-users (overcoming the speed of light problem experienced with traditional CDN providers). Saturn’s permissionless and crypto-incentivized attributes allow for a more ‘elastic’ supply to match with fast demand growth in developing regions like Asia and Africa, which are currently experiencing those latency issues today.

2) Saturn served an average of ~10.3 Billion requests monthly across 2023

Saturn has a network capacity of around 25+ terabits per second (approximately 10% of the network capacity of Cloudflare). An average of 10.3 Billion requests are served monthly across 2023, with 3.7 Million Gigabytes of monthly bandwidth served. Over 478 million daily requests were being handled as of the end of July 2023, which is close to 50% of IPFS Gateway’s daily requests in the same time frame. Despite its progress thus far, there remains room for stabilization in Saturn’s network capacity.

3) Time-to-first-Byte is already under 80 milliseconds

Speed is an area where Saturn has shown significant results; the median TTFB (time-to-first-byte) is already under 80 milliseconds. Typically, a good TTFB lies below 100 ms for static content, and 200–500 ms for dynamic content. Saturn today is already the fastest content-addressable CDN globally with 80 ms TTFB and has further headroom for improvement as the network continues to become denser. Aside from Saturn, there also exist parallel developments to drive improved retrieval performance in the Filecoin network. This includes projects such as Rhea, which is seeking to optimize IPFS Gateway performance.

What’s next for Saturn

Since its public launch, Saturn has achieved significant progress as an open-source, community-run CDN network. Moving forward, the team looks to continue pushing towards better TTFB speeds, while improving performance correctness and latency. Towards the end of 2023, Saturn looks to achieve further milestones. These include serving 100% of IPFS.io traffic, implementing metering and billing on the customer demand side, and launching a web app to enable customer self-onboarding who want to accelerate content with Saturn.

You can keep up to date with Project Saturn, and other projects within the RMWG here. Data in this post is accurate as of 31st August 2023 unless otherwise stated.

Many thanks to the amazing HQ Han, Jonathan Victor, Alexander Kintsler, and the Project Saturn team for their input in publishing this piece.

🇨🇳Filecoin检索市场发展更新：聚焦Filecoin Saturn

Disclaimer: This information is for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute investment, financial, legal, or other advice. This information is not an endorsement, offer, or recommendation to use any particular service, product, or application.

Editor’s Note: This blog is a repost of original content from IOSG Ventures. IOSG Ventures is a community-friendly and research-driven early-stage venture firm. This blog post represents the independent views of the author, who has given permission for re-publication.

Projects Mentioned: Filecoin, GLIF, STFIL, Collectif, Web3Mine, Stacks

TLDR:

• The programmable layer on FIL, the FVM, allows for trustless marketplaces to be built
• This calls for a need for a marketplace that currently exists off-chain, i.e. FIL borrowing to be brought on-chain, where FIL token holders lease their FIL to Storage Providers (which some call “miners”) who borrow FIL from the pool(s)
• FIL borrowing is essentially taking cash forward on the future block rewards accrued by the Storage Providers, and this makes FIL block rewards from data storage more capital-efficient
• There are obvious trade-offs to be made between centralization-capital efficiency- and security in protocol design
• The market size for borrowing FIL is reducing over time but the introduction of stablecoins, etc. Can unlock unique projects to be built on top of these protocols

The launch of a programmability layer on a seasoned blockchain generally comes with a lot of excitement. The launch of Stacks (STX) on the Bitcoin blockchain brought a new paradigm of thinking amongst the community built around it.

A very similar narrative happened with the launch of the FVM on Filecoin. The robust Filecoin community now has to see its vision through a completely different lens. A lot of open problems that the ecosystem had could now be addressed. Creating trustless marketplaces via programmability was a key piece of the puzzle.

Liquid staking on Filecoin was the first “Request-for-build” from the Filecoin ecosystem during the launch of FVM and was given high importance. To understand why this is, let us first understand how the economics of Filecoin work.

How Filecoin Incentives Work

Unlike an Ethereum validator, there is no one-time staking in Filecoin. Every time a Storage Provider (SP) provides services, they need to put up a pledge amount in FIL. This pledge is required to seal the sectors and store the sealed sector in the SP. Such a structure ensures that the SP is going to store data for their clients for the period of the deal that they agree to, in exchange for rewards. Rewards are distributed via PoSt (Proof of Space-Time), where the SPs are rewarded for proving that they have the right client data stored.

SPs are selected via a leader selection mechanism called DRAND. DRAND chooses the leader with some initial requirements and also the % of raw byte power of the network controlled by the SPs.

SPs will have to keep ramping up raw byte power (RBP) to be chosen as the leader to “mine” a block and receive incentives. This helps the SP subsidize their storage costs.

Although there are many more factors that govern the supply rate of these incentives, the baseline is that for storage providers/miners, to maximize their bottom line will have to try to maximize RBP and onboard (and renew) more deals.

This creates a positive loop for the Filecoin network

Economics of a Storage Provider

When an SP receives block rewards, these rewards are not liquid. Only 25% of the rewards are liquid, and the remaining 75% of the block rewards vest linearly over 180 days (~ 6 months). This poses a problem for SPs. The rewards, which are supposed to be an SP’s operating income, are now delayed payments for as long as the SP onboards/renews deals.

Let us look at the SP balance of the top miner in the network (as of 6th August 2023)

Storage Provider Account Balance Change, Source: FilFox

When you look at the graph, one can see that only about 1% of the rewards (or operating income) of the SP is actually liquid. If this SP now wants to either:

• Pay for operating income
• Upgrade hardware
• Pay for maintenance
• Or onboard/ renew deals

The SP will have to either borrow fiat currency or borrow FIL from third parties just to make up for these “delayed” payments.

At the moment many storage providers (miners) in the network rely on CeFi lenders such as DARMA Capital, Coinlist, and a few others. As these are loan products, storage providers will have to go through KYC and a strict audit process to be able to borrow FIL.
When we look at the map below, we can see a very high concentration of Filecoin SPs in Asia, and with centralized providers being mostly in the West, it is very hard for them to underwrite FIL loans to Asian miners with favorable terms, and most Asian miners/ SPs don’t have access to such providers.

Source: Observable Dashboard by @jimpick

This becomes a hindrance for new SPs to come in and participate in the system, and existing SPs can scale their business only as much as the total FIL pool size of these CeFi lenders

So why not just borrow fiat currency from a bank? With FIL being a volatile asset, it will pose additional capital management challenges for SPs who borrow.

To solve this problem, there needs to be a marketplace for FIL lenders (who could be holders of FIL) and FIL borrowers (SPs)

Filecoin Staking

With the launch of the FVM, this marketplace idea can come to fruition. FIL lenders/stakers can now put their FIL to work and SPs can borrow from this pool (either in a permissioned or permissionless manner) all governed by smart contracts.

There are many players in the ecosystem who are already building this and waiting to launch in the coming months.

More than calling such marketplaces staking protocols, it is a lot closer to a lending protocol by the nature of this business.

Some base features of such a FIL lending product would be:

• Lenders deposit idle FIL and receive a “liquid staking” token
• Borrowers (SPs) can borrow from the pool against collateral that exists in the SP actor (Essentially Initial Pledge + Locked Rewards)
• Borrowers will make interest payments every week, or any specified time period, by signing over the “OwnerID” of the SP to a smart contract
• Lenders receive the interest (minus protocol fees) as APY either via a rebase token or a value accrual token

Existing players in the system include:

Source: Starboard Leaderboard

Different liquid staking protocols have different schools of thought when it comes to borrowing:

Over/ Fully collateralized vs. Undercollateralized

In Over-collateralized or fully collateralized models, the debt-to-equity ratio is always going to be less than or equal to 100%. This means that if my SP balance is say 1000 FIL, I can only borrow up to 1000 FIL (depending on the protocol rules as well). This can easily be coded into smart contracts and default risk is built in. This allows for greater transparency and also security to the stakers (lenders). Another advantage of such a model is that it allows for permissionless borrowing as well. This is where the product blocks more like Aave/ Compound rather than a Lido or RocketPool.

In an uncollateralized model, the lenders are bearing risk while the risk is being managed by the protocol. In such a model, risk modeling is complex math that cannot be baked into smart contracts, and needs to be off-chain which sacrifices transparency. But, since there is leverage involved, it makes the system a lot more capital-efficient for the borrower. The more permissionless a leveraged system will get, the more risk the lenders bear and this would call for a very robust and dynamic risk management model that is run by the protocol developers

The trade-offs being made are:

• Capital efficiency vs. staker risk
• Capital efficiency vs. transparency
• Lender risk vs. borrower entry to the system

Single Pool vs Multi-Pool

Protocols can also opt to build a multi-pool model where lenders can choose to stake FIL in different pools with different risk parameters. This allows for risk to be managed on-chain, but liquidity will be fragmented. In a single-pool model, risk will have to be maintained off-chain. Overall the trade-offs will still remain the same as the ones mentioned above.

Trade-off: Liquidity fragmentation vs Risk management transparency

Risks

In an overcollateralized model, even if the miner gets slashed multiple times, as soon as the Debt-to-equity ratio hits 100% the miner will get liquidated and the stakers will be comparatively safe

In an undercollateralized model, the borrowers can be penalized for failing to prove sectors. There are many more faults in failing to prove data storage rather faults in the consensus itself. This is more common in Filecoin than in other general-purpose blockchains because there is an actual commodity that is being stored from an off-chain entity. This will affect the collateral value and lever the borrower more. Liquidation thresholds will have to be set very carefully in such a model.

Filecoin Miner Penalties (90 days). Source: Starboard

Comparison of Key Market Players

What about Ethereum Staking/Lending protocols entering the market?

In the Filecoin ecosystem, unlike the Ethereum ecosystem, the nodes (Miners/Validators/SPs) are responsible for much more than general uptime. They are supposed to market themselves to be chosen as SPs, and regularly upgrade their hardware to support more storage, seal, store, maintain, and retrieve data. Filecoin storage and reward mining for SPs is a full-time job.

Unlike an Ethereum validator, there is no one-time staking in Filecoin. Every time an SP provides storage to a client, they need to put up a pledge. This pledge is required to seal the sectors and store the sealed sector in the SP. Storage provision on Filecoin is a very capital-intensive process and this discourages many new SPs from participating in the network and existing SPs from staying and contributing to the network.

Since the participants on the borrow side are SPs only it is also going to be intensive for newcomers in the Filecoin ecosystem to bootstrap borrower trust.

The mechanics of Filecoin alone don’t allow Ethereum staking or even lending protocols to deploy easily on the FVM.

Economics of the Protocol

Is there enough FIL in the market to supply for lending?

As of August 6th, 2023, there are about 264.2 million FIL circulating that are not committed as sector pledges or rewards that are to be released. This can be counted as the total amount of FIL that can be staked by the lenders into the pool

Source: FilScan

Is there enough demand for borrowing?

While FIL borrowing is essential to SPs, what are they actually borrowing? They are taking a forward payment on their locked-up rewards in an overcollateralized model, and in the undercollateralized model, they are taking a forward payment on future rewards.

Looking at the graphs above, we can see that the total locked rewards are about 223M FIL, and the supply can match the demand. The demand-to-supply ratio is almost 84%. This shows even power dynamics on either side, and either side cannot squeeze the other on interest rates/ APY.

What does the future look like?

Estimating the market for future demand of FIL for borrowing is essentially the amount of FIL that will be released in the future as rewards.

The good folks at Messari ran a simulation of FIL circulating supply with a 3-year and a 50-year forecast using different cases.

Source: Messari

According to the top left graph, considering a conservative scenario where there is low onboarding of data and only 10% of the total deals are renewed, the new reward emissions over 3 years are close to around 100M FIL and in an aggressive scenario where there is a high amount of data onboarding and 70% of existing deals renewed, the extra rewards come to about 200M FIL

So one can expect a market size of somewhere between 100M — 200M FIL over the next 3 years. At the current price of FIL (Aug 6th), which is $4.16, there could be a borrowing TAM of about $400M — $800M. This could be counted as the TAM of the product’s borrow side.

On the supply side, in the conservative estimate, there can be about 300M FIL that will be emitted, and in a more aggressive scenario, the circulating supply is simulated to be around the same as it is today. Why? It is because if more deals are being onboarded and renewed, there will be a lot more FIL locked-in sector pledges.

In the more aggressive scenario, the demand is going to outweigh the supply and the interest charged can be higher in this competitive market.

Where I think this can go

Amongst the different designs, there need not be a winner-takes-all type of model. Intuitively, the long-term winner (by TVL) is generally the protocol that is built most safely. Very much like Lido in the Ethereum ecosystem. I for one am biased towards safer structures more than optimizing for 2–3% more yield, and I think FIL whales would also prioritize capital safety over a slightly higher yield.

This is after considering the amount of penalties miners pay for not being able to prove space-time.

From the borrower (SP) end, the SP could borrow from different protocols for different purposes. If the SP already has a lot of collateral and doesn’t need to lever up to pay for opex, then the safer, overcollateralized model will work better, since it is safer. Whereas if I am a newer SP with a lot of sectors to be pledged I would borrow with leverage from an undercollateralized pool.

After studying the above models, we can see:

Staking in Filecoin is important to bridge the supply and demand for FIL in the ecosystem. The FVM has recently been released allowing for a lending marketplace to exist. Although the problem is real, the FVM release was probably too late for most FIL staking/lending protocols as the pie (mining rewards) is decreasing over time making it a niche market.

However, a few fascinating use cases can emerge on top of these staking protocols. With the introduction of stablecoins, the rewards can be taken as cash forwards. Something similar to what Alkimiya is building on Ethereum. This can result in the injection of new capital into the Filecoin ecosystem and also increase the TVL in these protocols.

Ethereum’s and Filecoin’s tech is different, their miners are different, their developers are different, their apps are different, and hence their communities. And for staking in particular, with every miner being “non-fungible” bootstrapping the demand side becomes a BD exercise and the success of it is directly proportional to the protocol’s reputation in the community.

Filecoin staking is a critical solution that needs to be built to get more SPs in the system, for retail to put their capital to work, create greater economic incentives as an ecosystem to attract more developers, and build useful products to build a positive flywheel. To know more beyond staking in the Filecoin ecosystem and the criticality of the FVM you can read this previous piece we published.

There are many more open problems to be solved in the Filecoin ecosystem, but we are positive that the Filecoin Ecosystem is working in the right direction to achieve its vision of storing humanity’s data in an efficient system.

🇨🇳Filecoin质押经济学

Unlike proof-of-stake cryptocurrency protocols that directly provide rewards for locking staked tokens, “staking” FIL is much more akin to a lease.

You may have heard of services or applications that enable “Filecoin staking.” However, “staking” on the Filecoin network is different from proof-of-stake cryptocurrency protocols like Ethereum. Filecoin “staking” allows storage providers (SPs) to borrow FIL which they use as collateral to provide storage on the Filecoin network.

Unlike proof-of-stake cryptocurrency protocols that directly provide rewards for locking staked tokens, “staking” FIL is much more akin to a lease. SPs borrow FIL to use as collateral and may pay a fee. Applications facilitating this may also take a fee.

You can think of a FIL lease to a storage provider like a car being leased to an Uber driver who makes money providing rides through the Uber platform. During the lease term, the car owner receives lease payments from the Uber driver; when the lease is over, the car is returned to the owner.

Why do storage providers need FIL collateral?

Filecoin storage providers (SPs) contribute data storage capacity to the Filecoin network.

In order to ensure that files are stored reliably over time, SPs are required to post FIL as collateral. If an SP fails to meet their responsibilities (perhaps they go offline or stop storing certain files) their collateral is slashed, meaning that they lose a portion of the FIL they posted as collateral.

A storage provider can buy or earn FIL to provide the collateral they need to run their data storage business, or they might borrow/lease FIL from existing token holders.

Centralized vs decentralized applications

Third-party centralized programs enable storage providers to borrow FIL to use as collateral. In the centralized model, token holders transfer custody of their FIL to centralized intermediaries for set periods of time. These intermediaries allow SPs to borrow FIL, and distribute fees collected to token holders.

This model requires that token holders trust the centralized intermediary with custody of their FIL. Some centralized programs rely on multi-sig transactions. Multi-sig is short for ‘multi-signature’, which means a transaction has two, or more, signatures before it is executed. However, multi-sigs still rely on human intervention.

In contrast to this centralized model, there are also numerous decentralized third-party applications that utilize smart contracts to enable SPs to borrow FIL to post as collateral.

Risk

Using any third-party application carries risks, and it is critical to thoroughly research any application to understand all these risks. Some areas to consider are:

• Audits: Has a third-party audited the code and are the results published publicly?
• Open Source: Is the code available to inspect publicly?
• Bug Bounty: Does the program provide a bug bounty to incentivize anyone to report/fix possible vulnerabilities?
• Trustless: Can you use the application without relying on an intermediary; is there a single point of failure?

More information on risk is available here.

Disclaimer: This information is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, legal, or other advice. This information is not an endorsement, offer, or recommendation to use any particular service, product, or application.