Editor’s note: There has never been a celebrity project like Filecoin. One week before the mainnet launch, the team hoped to fork Filecoin, and a week after the mainnet launch, various fork declarations were released. The sound of Filecoin’s fork has been endless, and we are constantly thinking about the reasons. Based on the three major Filecoin “fork” projects, this article analyzes how to successfully fork.
In the cryptocurrency market, once a branch circuit is developed, a group of followers and challengers will immediately emerge.
“Imitators” and “follow the trends” have greatly avoided the uncertain risks caused by “innovation”, saved a lot of market research, code development, market education costs, and can also avoid many “first movers” The verified errors can even be improved. Any single track cannot be a dominating situation. To be an “imitation” or “follower” of a verified track, or the “imitation” we often say, can also be done with the “backward advantage” Into a successful project.
In the cryptocurrency market, strategic “imitation” is not uncommon, but how to successfully “imitate” and share the market has become a problem that every “challenger” must face.
The number of items that can be accommodated by a single track must be limited. Eventually, one or two head items will occupy 80% of the market. Then in the early stage of the brutal growth of a certain track, how can many “imitators” and Finding high-quality “challengers” among “followers” has also become a problem that investment institutions need to face.
This article takes the distributed storage track as an example. This article analyzes and compares Filecoin’s three “imitators”: FileCash, FileStar, and Eipk Protocol, and concludes that there are three dimensions in judging “imitators” or “challengers”:
(1) Clear expression of project vision and story
(2) Differentiated technical level optimization and technical application distinction
(3) More attractive in economic model design
“Forks” and “Imitators”
In distributed storage, the hot blockchain technology branch track, before the Filecoin mainnet went live, people in the market who wanted to “fork” Filecoin had already been undercurrents, like this big branch track, Even if it gets 5%-10% of the market volume, it is 500 million to 1 billion. But at present, the projects that claim to be a Filecoin fork are basically just “imitators” of the Filecoin project, not the “fork” Filecoin they claim.
In the history of blockchain, if there is a consensus conflict between two communities in a certain project ecology, which causes one chain to become two chains, a certain currency will also be mapped 1:1 to generate a new currency, so the most obvious The characteristic of is that the original currency held (forked project) needs to be mapped 1:1; and the code of the original project is copied directly, and the token airdrop will not be performed, and the data on the chain (chain height) will start running again. We call it “imitation disk”.
The simplest example, compared to BTC Bitcoin, BCH is a “fork” and Litecoin LTC is a “challenger”.
Obviously, none of the projects on the market that claim to be a Filecoin fork does not have a 1:1 mapping of FIL tokens, so Filecoin forks are basically ruled out.
From a technical point of view, the Filecoin project is not like Bitcoin. It can be forked by copying code, splitting computing power, and mapping tokens. In terms of the difficulty of the fork, the data stored in Filecoin must be backed up again. Now Filecoin The data stored on it is nearly 1EB, which makes it extremely difficult to fork.
In addition, most miners now have pre-stakes, and Filecoin really needs to rely on the application support of the later application ecology. These are not problems that can be solved by forks.
Therefore, all current Filecoin “fork” projects should be called “Imitation Disk” or “Imitator” of Filecoin. Whether it is FileCash, FileStar, Eipk Protocol, the project team does not shy away from mentioning themselves in the white paper. It was modified in the Filecoin project white paper.
Note: In the current network environment, everyone has more standardized the term “fork”, and collectively referred to “fork” in the technical sense and “imitation” in the strategic sense.
How to successfully “fork” a project
The core of the fork is differentiation. The core of the search for differentiation lies in finding the pain points of ecological participants and providing ecological participants with a new choice.
Taking the Filecoin project as an example, Filecoin’s economic model has brought a lot of trouble to miners: in the traditional sense, miners only need to buy machines and plug them in, and everything is ok, but Filecoin miners not only need to install machines, install systems, and deploy, Then maintain the distributed storage system, and even need to solve the official code bugs and understand Filecoin’s economic model to choose a better mortgage strategy. It puts miners in a very difficult situation, making it difficult for later miners to enter and restricting the future development of the entire ecology.
Finding a huge pain point, and using this pain point as an entry point for the fork project, can you gain a true “imitator” or even a “challenger”.
The power of story
Recently Elon Musk said on Twitter: “Toss a Bitcoin to ur Witcher.”
This sentence is actually translated as “Deliver a bitcoin to your witcher.” This sentence is actually changed from “Toss a coin to your Witcher.” This is a song.
“Toss a coin to your Witcher” This song is about “the power of story”. From “Witcher”, the low-status witcher is respected because of a catchy poem, not only sung in the song. “The demon hunter is the best friend of mankind” and praised the richness of human society, and finally emphasized “remember to pay the demon hunter.”. Since then, the status of the demon hunter among humans has ceased to be a “butcher” but a “warrior”. This is the power of the story.
Any blockchain project, whether it is a “fork” project or a new project, needs a cohesive and attractive description or “story” to shape its image in the hearts of investors, gain attention and even participate.
Especially in the fringe market where this blockchain application is stored, many concepts are newly proposed. It is difficult for investors to find reliable or highly relevant historical data as the basis for investment decisions, plus the current blockchain market The high-speed and fragmentation of the company gives all investors a feeling of endless investment opportunities, so the “decision-making” time for a single project is constantly being diluted. In this case, listening to stories is easier to grasp than looking at data Everyone’s attention, so “story” not only becomes the key to grabbing attention, but also one of the conditions for high-weight investment decision-making.
But for the Filecoin fork project (or imitation), it is not only necessary to tell a story to potential users, but also to provide another option for those who are hovering at the door of the Filecoin project, unwilling to buy it, and hesitant.
But we also need to adjust our “story” propaganda focus according to market changes. For example, the current Filecoin “fork” project is almost all claiming that it has no pre-staking. This is obviously a crazy show of “miners”. This statement has been When the “homogenization” is extremely serious, the degree of dislike for this story will also increase.
For imitators or innovators, they can also differentiate themselves from previous projects at the story level. They can put themselves on a small enough track, or they can supplement it in the ecological dimension.
The most prominent innovation and transformation at the story level is the Epik Protocol. Judging from the Epik white paper and the description on the official website, Epik’s original intention was to use a decentralized storage technology to build a knowledge graph network. The fact that AI is used as data, or the raw data of machine learning, is a huge difference from Filecoin’s current lack of application scenarios and difficulties in commercial realization.
Technological innovation
When we review the history of forks again, we will discover the importance of technology in the “fork” and “imitation” projects of the project, but after demonstrating multiple forked projects, we found that the original main chain was forked The team usually has a deeper understanding of the technical indicators of the chain. The “fork” project is usually a follower. After a deep understanding of the design of the technology, technical modifications can be made on the premise of ensuring stability.
The beginning of the BCH fork was due to the “expansion” dispute, so why does the core developer team of Bitcoin have to be stuck with the block capacity of Bitcoin 2M?
This involves the problem that Satoshi Nakamoto demonstrated when setting the size of a single block. The expansion mainly solves the problem of throughput on the chain. If you are waiting at a train station, the interval between trains entering the station is 1 hour. , The compartment capacity is 10 people. Once the train is fully loaded, the 11th passenger can only take the next train. In this example, the passenger is a Bitcoin transaction waiting to be confirmed. Blockchain platforms such as Bitcoin or Ethereum can process about 10 transactions per second on average.
Obviously a large block capacity will increase the throughput of the chain, but a larger block will require the node to have greater bandwidth and storage, which will have a higher threshold for the node. For the blockchain network Departure from the ideal of centralization.
This is the root cause of the split in the Bitcoin community. In fact, the Bitcoin developers at the time did not completely reject the expansion, but only pointed out the need for careful expansion.
Let’s talk about Litecoin. It is said that the success of “Litecoin” is because of the good marketing of “Bitcoin gold, Litecoin silver”, but in fact, Litecoin has made some micro-innovations based on the technology of Bitcoin, such as:
1. Bitcoin generates a block every 10 minutes, while Litecoin generates a block every 2.5 minutes. This means that Litecoin has a faster transaction confirmation efficiency. Bitcoin transfers sometimes take an hour or more to arrive, but Litecoin generally only takes less than 20 minutes to confirm.
2. Since the confirmation speed of Litecoin is 4 times that of Bitcoin, and the reward for each block is the same as Bitcoin, the total currency is also 4 times that of Bitcoin, which is 84 million Litecoins, which is more than Bitcoin production high.
3. Litecoin uses script encryption algorithm. Compared with Bitcoin’s SHA256 encryption algorithm, Litecoin LTC has a slightly lower amount of calculation than Bitcoin, making mining easier and more suitable for graphics card (GPU) operations.
In addition, the relationship between the Litecoin project and the Bitcoin Core team is particularly good. Litecoin has always been a test product of the new technology of Bitcoin. If the new technology has problems, the loss will be much smaller than that of directly experimenting on Bitcoin. . Moreover, Litecoin is not as decentralized as Bitcoin, and the decision to deploy a new technology is much faster than Bitcoin.
Therefore, we can see that many technologies (such as Segregated Witness) will be first deployed on Litecoin for experimentation, which is a bit like the Kusama network of the current Polkadot DOT network.
Then, by analogy to the Filecoin fork project, you can actually see that both FileCash and FileStar have modified the original Filecoin code. For example, FileCash will upgrade the P1 core algorithm, and upgrade the SHA256 algorithm to SHA512; calculate the P1 stage The number of layers has been reduced from 11 to 8 layers, which greatly improves economic efficiency; the sector size is modified to 16G to reduce memory usage.
It is important to talk about why FileCash changed the size of the fan blade from 32G to 16G and did not continue to shrink. Obviously, the FileCash team has carefully considered this issue, which is still related to the throughput bottleneck of the blockchain.
The size of the 32G fan blade means that the smallest storage unit on this storage network is 32G, which is very large for general file storage. The reason for setting such a large size is that the TPS of the Filecoin network is not High, the smaller the size of the fan blade will occupy approximately Filecoin network throughput. While keeping the network TPS unchanged, a larger fan blade can ensure that the network will not be too congested, but the price of a large fan blade is the long packaging time of the miners.
So FileCash’s careful technical choice on this detailed issue is indeed worthy of praise.
“Consensus migration” triggered by economic models
For blockchain projects, it is not just technology or tools that will be recognized if they are done well. If the blockchain system is to be run, a large number of node participation or consensus is required. The key point here is the economic model. Whether the design is perfect or reasonable.
For blockchain projects, token financing has replaced equity financing, which represents a structural change and essential difference in the distribution of rights and interests. The distribution of benefits in traditional equity financing is between shareholders, while blockchain The benefit distribution of the project is among the participants, and the token holders and all ecological participants can obtain the benefit distribution.
On top of the network effect, the blockchain has reached a new level: ecological benefit. Under the decentralized system, anyone can join the network without permission, and the business boundaries are endless.
How the value of the project ecology gives the value of the token, and how the value of the token encourages ecological participants, this is the original intention of the economic model design of the blockchain project.
This is especially true for “fork projects”. A good economic model design can attract ecological participants. After all, most ecological participants are not loyal to the ecology, but to their interests.
The most direct example is: Sushiswap can be regarded as a “fork” of Uniswap. Uniswap did not launch its own token in the early stage. This gave Sushiswap a token economic model design and value capture mechanism to snatch Uniswap’s liquidity pool. It became one of the most successful “fork” projects in the Defi field this year.
But value capture and token empowerment are only the most basic economic model design. In the economic model design of distributed storage incentive layer tokens, it is the economic model to establish the game structure of each participant in the ecology through the design of the token economic model. The difficulty lies in the design.
A successful economic model design should allow all ecological participants to spontaneously and continuously participate in ecological construction. When the internal ecological cycle is opened, the infinite cycle expands and expands, rather than a zero-sum game within the ecology.
Let’s take the Ethereum Gas fee model design as an example. Network congestion will cause the gas fee to rise, which will cause the number of messages to decrease, and then alleviate the congestion. This is the performance of the “negative feedback” mechanism in the economic model design. A small part, and this “negative feedback” mechanism can be seen everywhere in the Filecoin economic model.
For example, the economic model design of Filecoin’s baseline release:
1. The released quota is related to the computing power of the entire network. In the early stage of network operation, as time goes by, the number of participants and the release also increase, so as to ensure that the profits of the participants are basically balanced. The current operation of the Filecoin network is basically the same. Due to the setting and adjustment of the baseline reward, the single-T revenue will basically remain balanced for a long time.
2. Another aspect of the baseline release is that it has an expectation of the network computing power. When the computing power exceeds the expectation, the baseline reward will no longer increase, so as to ensure that the reward will not be excessive. When the network computing power exceeds the designed baseline, the rewards for miners may mainly come from the increase in currency prices.
In addition, Filecoin’s pre-collateralization will also play a role in stabilizing the price, which is why FIL is extremely stable in this round of high volatility.
Let me talk about the three “fork” projects of Filecoin. FileCash, FileStar, and Eipk Protocol have not changed much in the economic model, which is the most worthy of the article. The only thing that stands out is the pre-stake cancelled by FileStar. It is more like a simple cancellation. I haven’t seen how FileStar guarantees the security of user data storage after canceling the pre-stake.
to sum up
This article compares and studies the “fork” and “imitation” projects on the market, and concludes that “imitators” or “challengers” have the following three dimensions: (1) Clear expression of project vision and story; ( 2) Differentiated technical level optimization and technical application distinction; (3) More attractive in economic model design.
Taking the distributed storage track as an example, this article analyzes and compares the three “imitators” of Filecoin from these three perspectives: FileCash, FileStar, and Eipk Protocol. The three projects have their own strengths, but the shortcomings are also obvious. ；
(1) Eipk Protocol, in terms of its own project positioning and vision description, found a segmented and accurate market positioning and differences, but apart from the “story”, the corresponding technical solution optimization and economic model design were not done Too many changes, or not clearly stated in the white paper.
(2) FileCash, indeed, has a sufficient understanding and depth of the underlying technical protocol of distributed storage, and has made customized changes to some detailed technical parameters; but there is no difference between what you have to do and Filecoin, and there is no way to do it. Good communication attracts miners, and there is no way to gather consensus among miners, so there are really very few miners participating in FIC mining.
(3) FileStar simply canceled the pre-mortgage on the economic model, but did not change the key technical parameters, and even changed back the already installed FIP-0004, 25% of the post-mortgage immediately released. , So there are still doubts about the stability of the network.
Therefore, the successful “forking” that we advocate should be more of a creative imitation. “Innovative imitation” was first proposed by Levitt of Harvard Business School. Drucker regarded it as a type of successful entrepreneurial strategy. .
Imitation is not creative. Creative imitation refers to the innovation of imitations in application or application scenarios. A creative imitator does not innovate a technology or a service, it just perfects the technology or application and repositions it. For example, highlight the characteristics of the product and adapt to slightly different markets.
“Last move, first come first, last in the competition first” is the core idea of the “fork” project. When the creative imitator starts to act, the market has been verified and the demand has been generated. It is an extremely effective strategy to make a successful “fork” project to divide the market.
