The Filecoin Plus community recently held its second notary election since launch. Applications to receive Notary status and DataCap grants are due May 25th and will be reviewed by the governance team, which includes members of the Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs, as well as those not actively involved in applying for Notary community members.

The Filecoin Plus community facilitates the storage of valuable data by adding a layer of social trust to the Filecoin network. Trusted customers want to use network storage to apply for DataCap subsidies, and DataCap can be used to motivate miners to conduct storage transactions. DataCaps allocated to clients can be used by clients in storage transactions with miners. These transactions come with a higher transaction quality multiplier, allowing for a 10x increase in the "quality adjustment power" of storage miners on the network (miners get better block rewards over time). In short, miners are highly incentivized to get transactions from customers who use DataCap to pay storage transaction fees. Notaries are the Filecoin Plus community-elected trustees responsible for distributing DataCap subsidies to those storing useful data on the network.

Elected notaries will hold positions until they run out of DataCap or until the next election, which is expected to be held before the end of the year. Notaries act as trustees for the Filecoin network, so if they abuse their allocation of DataCap, they may lose that position.

For this election cycle, we have amended the election requirements to allow a minimum of 5 notaries in North America, Europe, and China instead of the previously required 3. This is also in response to increased DataCap applications in these regions and higher participation in the Filecoin Plus community. The election of the first notary in Oceania demonstrates the growing global participation in the Filecoin Plus community.

Due to the increasing demand for resources, up to 7 Notaries per region can now operate in order to meet the expected allocation of DataCap. So far, the notary has awarded about 800 tebibytes of DataCap to clients in all regions who have used DataCap to store more than 250 tebibytes of data on the Filecoin network. In this round of notary elections, a new DataCap of 5.3 pebibytes was awarded, a substantial increase from the data awarded in the previous election cycle, which was 1.9 pebibytes.

According to another report from Filecoin, as Venus passed the security audit performed by the Least Authority, Venus released the Venus v1.0.0 version, which will enable global storage providers and customers to store value more securely on the Filecoin network. The data.

Venus is the Go language implementation of the Filecoin network, dedicated to improving the network security of Filecoin and the applicability of distributed clusters. After three months of investigation and modification, Venus has passed a security audit performed by Least Authority, a leader in security audits for open source software development projects. The Venus team adopted the recommendations of the Least Authority and modified key issues in the execution process, such as chain synchronization, key security, API stability, and structural rationality. Improvements to these key areas further enhance the safety and efficiency of Venus.

Since IPFSForce took over Venus in October 2020, the project has now achieved two milestones, including the first node deployed and the first storage pool built on the Filecoin network.