More resilient and user-controlled than the AWS: Colin Evran’s vision for Filecoin

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In early 2021, Filecoin was a relatively unknown decentralized peer-to-peer storage service whose total network capacity was barely making a dent in the digital storage space. Less than 2 years later, the Filecoin team claims that the blockchain has grown to eclipse 10% of the storage capacity of Amazon Web Services, the most popular vendor in the cloud infrastructure services market. This includes the use of storage – by well-known blockchain firms such as OpenC and Magic Eden – of approximately 239.03 terabytes of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which were valued at an estimated $26.6 billion at the beginning of September.

NFT Storage on Filecoin | Source: NFT. storage

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How did Filecoin become so successful? And what motivates its developers to grow the ecosystem? Colin Avran, head of ecosystem at Protocol Labs, which is the creator of Filecoin, says a big factor in his desire to join Filecoin was his disillusionment with how things work in Web2.

“It’s still going in the wrong direction,” he said. “A handful of companies are now controlling the world’s data, in my opinion, without any checks and balances. And I thought that over a period of several decades such a level of centralization would not be the answer for everyday users.

“I basically believe that if you zoom out 40 years from now, the answer is no like AWS stores 100% of the world’s data. I don’t think it’s good for society. Me Don’t think that’s what users really want,” he said. Told.

Avran took some lateral steps on its way towards the blockchain sector. After completing Ivey Business School at Western University in 2006, he became an analyst for McKinsey before venturing into private equity. He then returned to the academic world to pursue his Masters from Stanford Business School.

Filecoin’s Colin Avran | Source: Twitter

After graduation, Avran founded a startup in the field of construction technology called “Yard Club”. Four years later, the firm was sold to Caterpillar, the world’s largest construction equipment designer.

As Evan pointed out, the financial guarantees from the deal gave him the ability to focus on a project that was much more intense. “I really wanted to work on a technology that if successful could impact every man, woman, child and every company in the world. So a good friend of mine introduced me to Protocol Labs, the creators of Filecoin.”

Filecoin’s Interplanetary File System (IPFS) enables users to store and transfer content in a peer-to-peer manner. It is the heart of Filecoin, which consists of three components: unique identity through content addressing, content linking via directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and content discovery via distributed hash tables.

As its incentive layer, Filecoin serves to verify that all data is stored with appropriate cryptographic proofs. Storage providers on Filecoin have two primary sources of revenue, block rewards and network fees. Block rewards are allocated proportionately based on accumulated cryptographic proofs of the data they store.

Currently, there are approximately 25,000 transactions per day on the Filecoin blockchain and a total of about 127 pebibytes (1PiB = 1,125,900 gigabytes) of data is stored. In terms of total capacity, Filecoin developers say that the network currently accounts for about 10% of AWS’s storage capacity.

Filecoin Network Metrics , Source: Starboard Ventures

At the beginning of the year, storing data on Filecoin at less than 1% of the cost of comparable services on AWS. But now, Avran points out, some storage costs have fallen into negative territory, while typical storage costs have also dropped to less than 0.5% of centralized providers.

“With costs so low, many small businesses and freelancers around the world can now afford to store people’s data.” He continues: “This is how Airbnb unlocked for the average homeowner the ability to host guests that would not have been possible in a hotel-dominated world.”

For Avran, the novel Filecoin virtual machine is an exciting technological development for the ecosystem this year. “Filecoin has been a storage and retrieval market until now. But what FVM can unlock is a multi-billion dollar DeFi economy on top of Filecoin.”

“With full compatibility with Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs), developers can build in two networks. We are looking at new use cases such as on-chain voting, data-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), decentralized verifiable computation, and more. Can bring. .”

At the moment, Filecoin storage providers have around $1 billion in collateral to store the deals and scale up operations. With further updates, it is possible to create DeFi tools that auto-renew transactions for token holders, essentially creating a “perpetual storage” network.

Moving forward, Avran explains that his vision is for Protocol Labs and Filecoin to become a hub for building decentralized technologies. “We helped seed the foundation of IPFS, which is now used by every single major blockchain such as Ethereum and Polkadot. But we also want people to come to our community and develop something transformative that will help us for Web3. be aligned with the values.” Despite the ongoing crypto winter, Filecoin still holds its place among the top players, with a total market cap of $1.8 billion.