The Filecoin Masterplan

FIL-Singapore was the largest Filecoin event to date celebrated by the community in Asia. It gathered builders from around the world to build, share experiences, and hear from other community members on what’s next for the network.

So far, web3 hasn’t been able to scale at the level that is required to meet the demands of web2 applications. These applications need an enormous amount of storage and an enormous amount of computational power as well. No blockchain today can do that amount of processing.

In order to have consumer applications on web3, we need sub-second delivery of data and computational pipelines on top. Juan Benet discussed precisely that while presenting The Filecoin Masterplan to:

Build the world’s largest decentralized storage network
Onboard and safeguard humanity’s data
Bring retrieval and compute capabilities to the data to build scalable applications

Altogether, this will position Filecoin as a “layer 0” for computational networks.

Part 1: Scalable Data Storage

The good news is that the first step in the plan has already been accomplished by the hard work of the Filecoin community over the past two years since the mainnet launch. The network has grown to over 15.9 EiB in raw byte storage capacity thanks to a motivated community of Storage Providers around the world.

This success has come by the hand of programs like FIL+ and ESPA Bootcamps as well as hardware providers dedicated to make SP operations easier and more effective. Other efforts, like Filecoin Green, are also making sure that this growth goes hand in hand with sustainability goals such as becoming a carbon-neutral — or even carbon-negative — network.

Part 2: Massive Data Onboarding

In 2022 alone, the Filecoin Network has gone from 22 PiB to 215 PiB of data stored on the network. This is an almost eightfold increase with over 2 PiB of data onboarded daily. Most of this growth has come from the amount of SPs accepting verified deals.

Right now, Filecoin is the largest decentralized storage network in the world, by far, with over 1,000 unique clients. It is also competing with many centralized cloud storage providers in web2.

The network’s ongoing success in onboarding data onto decentralized storage has come via a strategy to onramp specific user segments. Particular verticals and use cases can find their own specialized solutions that bring easy and effective access to the Filecoin Network.

These solutions include NFT.Storage for NFT metadata, the Slingshot program for preserving open datasets, and other aspects of the FIL+ program that provide cost-effective ways to store data. In turn, each of these are already used to power consumer applications in music, video, gaming, and the metaverse.

The community is also working on projects like CDNs, Saturn Retrieval Markets, and other ways to achieve sub-second retrieval times on Filecoin.

Part 3: Making Data Useful

Filecoin’s storage capacity has solved part of the problem of web3 infrastructure for consumer applications. Now, the community is working on developing the computational power to respond to these needs. This is where the Filecoin Virtual Machine and compute over data come in.

The FVM will bring smart contracts and programmability over the blockchain’s state, while compute over data will enable large-scale computation to take place over the network’s data. As a result, the Filecoin Network will be home to decentralized computation networks that will be built on top of it and rely on data that is stored on Filecoin. Together with current research being done at ConsensusLab around scalable throughput, these developments will enable new kinds of consumer-facing decentralized web3 applications.

These capabilities will also count on bridges to other networks so that Filecoin can also compute data from other chains. Read more about what the FVM unlocks and take a look at the project’s roadmap.

Onwards and Upwards

The Filecoin Masterplan is fully underway and approaching its third step of adding compute over data capabilities to the network. All of these developments have been the result of hard work by builders in the community. If you’d like to be a part of the plan, join us on Slack.

You can also watch a full video recording of Juan’s keynote address.