Important parameters
1. The basic situation of Filecoin
The much-anticipated Filecoin project was officially launched on the mainnet at block height of 148888 on October 16, 2020.
Filecoin is a decentralized cloud storage market. Centralized cloud storage is popular because of its high efficiency, but still has problems such as high cost, low security, and privacy leakage. The Filecoin project provides encrypted information storage functions because of the decentralized cloud storage it provides, which has the advantages of low cost, high security and full utilization of idle resources.
2. Filecoin token economy
Filecoin actually has three functions in the ecosystem
1. The block packaging verification function of the public chain
2. The function of storing files
3. The function of retrieving files
In order to achieve and optimize the above three functions, the government has designed a series of rewards, punishments, mortgages, and lock-up mechanisms.
Based on these three basic functions, in order to stabilize the long-term value of the tokens, the official Filecoin team has made corresponding optimization adjustments.
Pre-staking: FIL tokens need to be pledged in advance to start the operation of the mining machine. For every increase of 32G computing power, 1FIL needs to be pledged, which means that the whole network is in short supply at the beginning. At present, the entire ecological 594PiB computing power, such as the normal packaging of the entire network, needs to pledge about 100 million tokens, and then the current pledge amount is only 12.41 million FIL, resulting in a large number of mining machines on the entire network that are not in operation. This move is like the sword of Damocles. On the one hand, it made the miners miserable, and on the other hand, it established certain support for the long-term development of the project.
Penalty mechanism: In order to allow miners to store long-term and stable, filecoin not only designed strict windowPost, but also made miners pay a huge price when interrupting sector storage services.
Block reward lock-up: miners get block rewards (about 11 FIL/block), released in 180 antennas, and can receive all rewards after 180 days. Filecoin officially released the economic model optimization draft on Github. In order to alleviate the dilemma that a large number of mining machines cannot be turned on in the early stage, it was decided to release 25% of the block rewards to miners immediately to ease the demand pressure on the secondary market.
Consensus mechanism: Different from Bitcoin’s POW mechanism, the consensus mechanism adopted by Filecoin is the space-time proof in the storage proof. Under this mechanism, the effective storage space of miners is a source of competitiveness, which can effectively avoid energy waste like the POW network .
Of the 2 billion FIL, 70% is allocated to miners, 1.1 billion is used as a block reward, and 300 million is used as a storage reserve reward: Unlike the BTC halving cycle, the initial block reward is halved every 6 years and will be based on later Adjust the specific conditions of the project.
The main income of miners in the initial stage of the operation of the Filecoin network comes from block rewards and storage rewards. With the gradual improvement of the ecological construction, the later retrieval rewards will gradually increase the corresponding proportion, exceeding the block rewards and storage rewards.
Of the total 2 billion FIL, 70% is used for miner rewards (15% of which are user reserves), Protocol Labs receives 15%, public and private investors account for 10%, and the foundation reserves 5% for ecological construction. 1.1 billion as a block reward, 300 million as a storage reserve reward: the initial block reward is halved every 6 years.
3. Competitive product analysis
The Filecoin project carried a large number of ecological assets, and its market value had a breakthrough increase when it was launched. In the competition of the entire storage sector, the Filecoin project has opened up the market value ceiling of the overall storage project. We suggest that we can also maintain a certain degree of attention to other storage projects in the future and enjoy the sector dividends.
Fourth, financing
Filecoin’s financing is divided into two rounds of private placement and public placement, with a total financing amount of more than 257 million US dollars. The same process as the IPO is used to ensure the legitimacy of the financing process. Institutional investors include Stanford University, Sequoia Capital, DCG Group, Y Combinator, A16Z, Union Square Ventures and other top investment teams.
Five, technical highlights
The technical highlight of Filecoin is mainly the unique consensus mechanism of the project. Proof of time and space (Post) and proof of replication (Porep) are used respectively.
The space-time proof mainly solves two problems, one is how much storage is provided, and the other is how long the storage is provided.
Proof of replication guarantees that the storage miner proves to the verifier that he stores the corresponding data in a specific storage space instead of storing multiple copies of the data in the same storage space. With PoRep, miners can prove that they are storing a unique code of customer data when they execute the proof.
There are already various types of applications on the IPFS protocol.
Seven, team background
Filecoin is headquartered in San Francisco, USA. Its founder Juan Benet graduated from Stanford University. In 2015, he participated in the famous YCombinator project and successfully founded the Protocol Lab.
core team
JuanBenet: Founder and CEO of Protocol Lab, Master of Computer at Stanford University
Marvin Ammori: General Counsel of Agreement Laboratory, Researcher of Stanford University Law School
Colin Evran: Graduated from Stanford University, served as a strategic consultant for the agreement laboratory
Jesseclay burgy: Graduated from Stanford University with a major in computer engineering. As a core member of the early protocol laboratory team, he contributed to the security of Filecoin library modules and transaction data circulation
