A look at the highlights of Filecoin 2024
Original author: Filecoin Network
The decentralized storage space is growing rapidly, and Filecoin is at an important moment. This article proposes two areas where the ecosystem needs to double down on its efforts and how we can track progress. This article is by no means exhaustive, but is written based on years of being immersed in the Filecoin ecosystem, collecting feedback from users, builders, and the community, and thinking deeply about what is needed for the network to evolve.
This article mainly consists of the following two parts:
What is the most important thing about Filecoin in 2024?
Why is it important and how can progress be measured?
We hope that with the right North Star in place, teams will be better able to align and identify convergence between project interests and ecosystem interests. The proposed framework and metrics should make it easier for capital and resource allocators in the ecosystem to assess the level of impact each team is creating and allocate capital and resources accordingly. For startups, this can help identify where broader ecosystem work might fit with their roadmap and product launches.
What is important about Filecoin in 2024?
1. Accelerate the conversion to paid transactions : Helping Filecoin providers increase their paid services (storage, retrieval, computing), which is critical to driving cash flow into Filecoin and supporting sustainable financing of their hardware beyond token incentives.
2. Growing on-chain activity : Filecoin’s goal is not just to be another L1 with similar user scenarios. But as a base layer, it does have a unique value proposition that includes “real world” services. This makes new use cases unique to Filecoin possible (programmable services, DeFi around cash flow, etc.). The establishment of these services and the increasing number of applications prove that Filecoin is not just a “storage layer”, but an economy with stable cash flow.
3. Make Filecoin an indispensable part : The bull cycle means speed is critical, and so is making Filecoin an indispensable part for more teams. There are many emerging topics to leverage, such as chain archiving, computing integration, artificial intelligence, and the positioning of Filecoin itself is also important. When more participants use Filecoin as a core part of their story, the ecosystem will explode. For individual teams, this means that it is important to deliver products to users. At the ecological level, this means focusing efforts on the teams that are closest to driving integration and building services on Filecoin.
The verticals in our framework are still at a high level, and many of these goals have their own set of tasks. But it is more critical that the ecosystem agrees that these are the right verticals to make progress in. We will dive deeper into each vertical and some specific metrics that the ecosystem should start tracking.
Why is it important and how can progress be measured?
1) Accelerate paid transaction conversion
As a storage network, Filecoin should maximize cash flow. Having incentives as a catalyst is great, but without a stable (and growing) number of paid transactions, Filecoin cannot reach its full potential.
Paid transactions (when settled on-chain) are net capital inflows into the Filecoin economy and can form the basis for unique use cases in our ecosystem. In the case of DeFi, there is a real opportunity to provide real services to businesses (such as converting currencies to pay for storage).
There are two main ways we can drive growth in paid services:
1. Driving growth of existing services (data archiving)
2. Expand to new markets through additional services (hot storage, computing, indexing, etc.)
In both cases, we need to do some work to reduce the friction of paid on-ramps, or introduce new features to raise the floor (as seen in on-ramps and projects trying to bring Filecoin services to market). It is most important that the Filecoin ecosystem collectively prioritize the right efforts to make Filecoin services marketable, and allocate resources accordingly.
There are already many teams making substantial progress in this regard, such as CID.Gravity, Seal Storage, Holon, Banyan, Lighthouse.storage, Web3 Mine and Basin , etc. We can measure progress by helping to reduce friction and helping to drive their success.
We recommend measuring success in this vertical in two ways:
1. Total amount and dollar value of data stored in paid transactions (self-reported portion)
2. Total amount of data stored in paid transactions and its USD value (on-chain portion)
The public product team took the following actions in the second quarter of 2024:
FilOz : New proof-of-concept FIPs are being developed to reduce storage costs and significantly increase retrieval speeds.
DeStor : is helping drive enterprise adoption of business-ready on-ramps.
Ansa Research, Filecoin Foundation, etc .: Web3 BD’s support for ecosystem builders.
Providing targeted grant funding to directly support efforts to grow sustainable on-chain paid transaction activity.
2) On-chain activity continues to grow
As L1, Filecoin has more than just storage services. Building a strong on-chain economy is critical to accelerating the services and tools that others build with it. In the Filecoin ecosystem, we have a unique opportunity to achieve true economic mobility through paid on-chain transactions.
Our on-chain economics revolve around supporting these processes, whether it’s automating updates, designing retrieval incentives, creating conditions for permanent storage, or building economic benefits for network operators, creating a flywheel effect that leads to compound growth.
As Filecoin has more economic activities of its own on the chain, the value of the token will continue to accumulate, allowing ecosystem users to use Filecoin in a more efficient way, thereby generating actual demand for internal ecosystem services.
We propose the following metrics to collectively measure success:
1. Contract call
2. Active Filecoin Addresses
3. On-chain payment volume
Some notable creators are already sowing the seeds for on-chain infrastructure to leverage some of these fundamentals (such as the GLIF team working on liquidity staking, the Lighthouse team focusing on storage endowments, and the Fluence team supporting computation).
Some improvements can significantly reduce the friction of promoting on-chain activities. The following tasks are prioritized in the second quarter of 2024:
FilOz : F3 brings fast finality to Filecoin, which can not only improve the bridging experience, but also enable more "trade" between Filecoin and other economies (such as local payments for Filecoin services by other ecosystems).
FilOz : Reconstruct Filecoin transactions to achieve more flexible payments (for example, using stablecoins).
FilPonto, FilOz : Reduce EVM technical debt and significantly reduce the resistance for builders to port Solidity contracts to Filecoin (strengthening the surrounding infrastructure to provide more stable services).
3) Make Filecoin indispensable
This vertical is broad, but we believe that the impact that the Filecoin ecosystem is having can be considered from the following two key aspects:
1. The first is high-profile integration . Filecoin is critical to the success of its users and its propositions, and it is particularly important for the ecosystem to provide the necessary support for these cross-chain integrations.
2. The second is to focus on specific verticals where activity is high and growing. Filecoin is uniquely positioned to provide value, both in terms of the fundamentals it has, as well as its cost profile and scale.
At present, Web3 has unlimited opportunities, and the ecosystem should gather workflows around on-ramps to make Filecoin an indispensable part of computing, DePIN (sensor direction), social, gaming, artificial intelligence, and on-chain archives.
We suggest the following metrics for evaluating Filecoin’s indispensability:
1. Number of partners and integrations
In the second quarter of 2024, the ecosystem team made many efforts to help on-ramps succeed in this regard:
Ansa Research, Filecoin Foundation, DeStor, etc.:
New working group formed to accelerate shared ecosystem BD and marketing resources
Share BD resources with Filecoin ecosystem builders
Shared marketing resources and amplification (#ecosystem-amplification in Filecoin slack) help signal ecosystem wins
Community Discord helps expand accessibility, visibility, and drive community engagement
Final Thoughts
With all of the above in mind, we hope to have a clearer picture of where Filecoin is headed in the coming year. Filecoin is at a critical juncture where many of its parts are coming together. Protocols and ecosystems evolve naturally, and each stage requires different priorities and strategies to achieve the next stage of growth. By focusing on the ecosystem, we believe the Filecoin ecosystem can make its resources and support go further.
We are excited about future developments and how Filecoin can continue to expand the scope of Web3 rails. Going forward, Ansa Research will provide regular updates on key metrics of Filecoin ecosystem progress.
