Juan Benet - Building Web3: Filecoin + Ethereum Better Together

Transcript

all right welcome everyone uh i'm going to talk about uh falcon and ethereum building web 3 and how we're better together quick about uh i started protocol labs which is a company that is driving breakthroughs in computing uh we make ipfs filecoin and a bunch of other protocols uh a lot of these are building blocks for many web 3 applications uh we make le p then you the networking stack for web3 used by a bunch of different uh different protocols we also made ipfs the data and content platform of web3 that has a large and growing ecosystem and we've made filecoin the storage network of web3 and so today i'm going to talk to you about that uh long term uh we're going to be

focusing on a bunch of other kinds of computing breakthroughs as well i'm sure that a lot of people here are interested in the future of computing so maybe we'll talk about that more in coming decades we're very ecosystem oriented so we build we tend to build open source projects that are modular that anybody can use for many kinds of many kinds of systems we tend to refactor things that are large into smaller components that are reusable by a bunch of groups we tend to do a lot through grants and investments into other other groups so this we have now in the last year or so become uh funders of many other organizations and many companies building in the web3 ecosystem and uh many of our projects end up creating ecosystems themselves so things like ipfs and podcoin have

large and growing ecosystems uh cool so filecoin i wanted to give a quick update on the progress so far since launched last october falcon is a centralized storage uh network designed to store humanity's most important and valuable information the goal is to use crypto economic incentives to summon a large network of storage providers that can then store all your data so build the cloud but with crypto the another component of filecoin is to create a retrieval network so think of cdns but powered by crypto this is the later stages of falcon the network launched in 15 2020 so it's been less than a year uh and so far here are some of the stats

uh we're almost at eight extra bytes of storage which is an enormous amount of capacity so i'll put it in context in a moment but i would think most of web3 stuff fits within 10 petabytes or so so this is a lot more data really fast and this is the power of crypto economic incentives right so if you create a mechanism you drop it into the network and if it's sound uh if there's a good reward there then networks will grow so you can think of falcon as a two-sided market where on one side you have clients and you can think of these as clients of storage individually so this could be uh individual users or companies that have a lot of data or applications so most of the clients

in vat point will be applications that then use falcon the way that you would use uh amazon s3 or something like that and on the other side there's the storage providers that add the storage facilities uh to the network and you can hear see pictures of the of some of the storage provider providers that are adding racks and racks and racks of drives into the falcon network just for context this is i had to like update the graph i haven't pulled the latest one but this is a snapshot of the different storage providers around the world and the growth rate of this network is is pretty crazy this is adding about 60 petabytes of data every day so that's about the size of the entire internet archive just for context

um and so every day there's like a new internet archive being added into the network so this is a staggering amount of capacity we are way above what we where we thought we would be just a few months after launch and this this growth rate itself might might increase uh later in the year we shipped recently an upgrade called hyperdrive um i think we've done like 12 or 13 network updates at this point um and those are upgrades in the same way that ethereum upgrades work and hyperdrive may even 5x or 12x uh this growth rate it already to exit it might increase it more uh here's a view into storage deals so this is the the uh set of uh of actual we falcon's structure is to first build a

bunch of capacity and then over time turn that capacity into useful storage uh so this is the network uh transacting there's about 18 close to 18 megabytes stored um so that these are kind of active deals on the network where parties are asking for storage you can see that there's a lot more capacity than storage so this means that there is huge amounts of capacity basically for free for you to use you just have to that use a web3 powered powered network so for the people that are going to be building in the hackathon think of what you might use free storage for or potentially negatively priced storage i'm going to talk about that a little bit later um but things like video and fts that are that are huge like full length

movies all that kind of stuff can now be thrown onto web3 uh here are some of the applications and tools that people are building on top of falcon so there's a lot of developer tools things like textiles a a company that's building a bunch of different kinds of tooling including most recently some auction style structures for they have like a like a connection to near and i think students coming to ethereum where you have a contract on chain that is auctioning deals that are coming out out of the you have consumer applications like slate so this is a view into one of the consumer apps you can think of it as a

gallery a way to kind of collect uh media on the web and and display it for for people so this is kind of really high quality uh product design um then you can think of also web development tooling so things like uh um fleek which it's kind of like a netlify style uh service where you can make it super easy for people to build and develop and deploy normal standard web services and and web applications into into ipfs and falcon there are also uh standard more um typical kind of personal storage applications like chain save files so this is kind of like a dropbox style component i think there's a there's a few more of these um i think we

also made one and there's also a bunch of interesting defy use cases where um there's uh people building the machinery the financial machinery to map asks and bids in the in the storage market this is just getting going so this is another area that's good for um for hackathons where um ways of representing kind of a nasty bid storage market uh so parties can um can see what's going on in the in the in the market uh and then there are also all kinds of interesting uh defy style um applications and systems where um being able to kind of uh reason about the economics of storage um and coupling the the finance of

uh of storage to crypto powers and d5 powers yields all kind of structures that weren't possible before right so for example this is this isn't quite what what um this group is doing but you could now do um hard drive futures so that's not like a thing that exists today oil and other commodities rely very heavily on a well financialized market with all kinds of future contracts to be able to kind of deal with the spikes in in supply and demand and you can do that now to hard drives and like properly commoditize them um and there are other networks like ocean protocol that are building uh data marketplaces on top of a double other networks like ipfs and

falcoin uh there are retrieval networks there's a few of them emerging where you can you know download a standard app and then offer your your uh um nodes uh storage and cache uh for other other parties in the network um and and so on this one i think power loom is making this kind of uh way of snapshotting entire websites kind of like an internet archive style thing where you can snapshot an entire website get a hash of that moment put all of that into ipfs and filecoin and then be able to verifiably prove that a website looked a certain way at a particular moment in time uh and then there's video there's a bunch of cool stuff with with video that people are doing both with uh

live peer good fi and video coin now uh where people are taking advantage of all this storage that's available to you to now do um video hosting and one of the coolest ones that i really like is is huddle which is doing this peer-to-peer video conferencing so think of zoom but where you take advantage of the local area network connectivity of wp uh and then you can uh record and back up all of your your conferences to or like your conversations uh to falcoin and they're kind of focusing on the education market in in india where the connectivity is not very good storage is super expensive um and then this has like a very good advantage uh cool and then there's a whole bunch

of developer tools so truffle infura and others cool so what's what's next uh there's a lot of stuff uh coming from from filecoin uh there's a lot of things around improving the stack so improving developer ux uh and getting to good product market fit put all that storage to use uh we got a scale so very quickly we hit the limits on the chain uh we're doing a bunch of stuff to both pack all the proofs with uh things like snark pack uh and so we're talking it's the biggest snark machine on the planet that we are doing way more snark proofs than anything else we gotta also scale the chain beyond that and do sharding so um we'll see let's have a race and see who uh who can ship shouting first and then we also uh i need to build the whole retrieval market

so this is uh i think that's that's up and coming uh and one of the things that most people are really excited about is having smart contracts in popcorn so we were hoping that bridges would be enough uh but but it's still kind of like clunky to to use without having smart contracts directly in falcoin so um there's proposals to add the evm or other vms uh into popcorn that'll make it easier to build bridges and to be able to kind of connect the economies and all kind of really cool things kind of drop out of that and there's a bunch of bridges that will come to to other networks so think of falcon as a way to back up a bunch of the storage in in other networks um and so we hope to kind of interconnect with with all the groups and there's a bunch of people building

so i think this year and next year are great for builders who want to think of it as like the early days of ethereum or the early days of other networks where suddenly you have all these new super powerful primitives still rough around the edges hard to use and so on but super powerful and give you things that you couldn't do before so we've built a whole kind of set of stages for people that want to build with hackathons accelerators and grants to help them going help them get going great so uh how falcon and ethereum are better together um so way back in defcon 2 we had a shirt that showed ipfsn and ethereum and had this better together thing so i was like great like let's let's do that version but for

fatcoin don't have shirts sorry uh maybe next time um here are some of the things that uh falcon ethereum uh do together is today so these are a whole bunch of shared components so things like ipfs and the p2p and the dap infrastructure stuff we borrowed the eip1559 gas model it's working great and we do a lot of vdf research together opportunities ahead so things like evm ens potentially drain and the beacon chain could could uh there might be something there around using both of them and we look forward to finally shipping vdf hardware someday and sharding uh one cool thing uh that you know does ethereum and and platform are doing together is storing 1.5 million nfts so this is most of the nfts

that exist and most of them most of them are coming from ethereum uh they're all addressed in ipfs and backed up with uh with fat coin this free nft storage so if you're building nft things and you want to make large nfps there you go um and then there are things around uh being able to kind of create a dataverse where you can um start making the the data that's on the more useful more valuable so think of falcon as a way to kind of think about transacting on moving the data or storing the data but then you can you can now start layering other kinds of economic values so think of nft says one version of this but there are other kinds of things that people might be able to do so think of data feeds and the utility of those or being able to auction those or sell

those to um to different parties uh yeah so pdf research and and so on eap 59 works great can can't wait for uh for this to ship in in theorem and you know the apps that you build uh that's what uh makes us better together so i'm gonna give you a bunch of ideas for the hackathon who here is gonna hack at the hackathon this week a few people not very many well for you and the people that didn't raise your hands go to the hackathon go build something or go to another one later in the year and for the people watching here's here's some ideas for you there's a big list that we collected last year for hike fest there's another hacker test coming

you can look at that list you can think of making this composable uh default that that i was talking about where you can think of the market orders like the ask the bids and the deals and make put those through a decks and be able to see what the market actually looks like and then you can think of all kinds of other financial structures you can build on top of that so things like hardware features like you know do do futures on hard drives and ssds and gpus and so on and all the hardware that's involved in the process or space time so you could actually do features on the storage contracts themselves and that's that's wild like that nobody's ever done that so that's a super crazy idea that we'll see what happens when when that emerges so you can now do video nfts with lots

of data so uh the video coin team built all the machinery to connect their video processing engine with file coin storage so now you can use their tooling to do all the video processing that you want on on being able to kind of like um piece together all the components for um uh transcoding the video and and putting exporting all the right relevant bits so that all the different browsers can render it well and all that kind of stuff um and so that means that you can do you know things like small movie clips or vine style things or like full length movies you know the vine thing the vine use case is a really good one nobody's made like vine meets nfts and

this is totally a thing that's you'll see that this will become a thing so for the people hacking you might consider doing this you can also do pay-per-view media so you can there's groups now doing token protected pages you can do that with full-length movies or music arbitrary web pages and you can also think of of selling the rights to do that so something that hasn't happened is uh right now nfts don't provide the the rights to to use it as productive asset but that should happen i think that right now that's sort of broken in the nft ecosystem and that needs to change so that nfts are way more useful and valuable you want to create an incentive structure for the buyer holder of that nft to then go and

um market it or make it more useful to the rest of the world so this is like a much more incentive aligned thing where if you sell the right to distribute the thing or charge for viewing the thing to the to the buyer then they're on the hook for for making that a productive asset and so the artists can just focus on producing the art and not have to worry about also marketing the rest of their content uh but they still get a royalty based on the split so i think when whenever this happens that's going to just blow up the nft market much much larger than it is now um and hey you can do it for for now a large content so movies or 3d environments or dynamic environments where like you have a programmable environment so think of like a game or

something like that and one idea that i want to um this is one of the ideas that i think is most interesting and most exciting that's available right now that uh not many people um fully get it takes a little bit of time to explain so in fact when we have a thing called falcon plus which means that certain deals from very very that are verified so this is like high quality storage uh have like this this this notarized verifiable claim that lets them create deals that give 10x the block rewards so this makes very attractive storage deals that means that then clients can go and auction off those

very valuable deals to miners miners who really want those extra block rewards bid with decreasing storage prices dropping all the price completely to zero or potentially negative pricing so we might i think the conditions are right uh today with falcoin to get finally uh negatively priced storage so you as a creator uh or a collector of valuable data can earn money for for giving the right to some source network uh to store your data and serve it to the rest of the world so that's totally new and this requires basically an auction house kind of like the standard nft ones so think of um like foundation or wearable or openc or things like

things of that nature and if you couple that with making a storage seal and kind of closing the the loop uh then you can get negatively priced storage uh with and that might be worth uh worth of time uh then there's other things like marketplaces agents and so on you can think of being able to build a market associated with each one of these each one of these chains uh cool i think uh we're one minute sweet um so i'll maybe flash some interesting kinds of data you might want to store data that was really cool i've already

explained this on the web you can you can find a good explanation out there uh so yeah we can now do all this stuff so see you in the metaverse uh thank you very much oh and last thing uh we're here to help so if you're getting started use hackathons to try out building something and then from there if you you can apply for a next step grant uh so pl is offering these next up grants for kind of like promising builders that want to just try out and see if that thing could become a promising uh project whether it's a non-profit or a startup or something like that uh and then we've also uh created a number kind of like an accelerator on ramp um throughout the whole year this year and next year uh for you for those some some subset of

those projects will then go on to accelerators and then there's investment funds and and whatnot so we know how hard it is to get things going so we're trying to make it way easier so if you're making a thing and you need support whether it's help with product help with tech help with thinking about company building we host office hours and if you need funding then there's a whole set of groups in our ecosystem that can help you with that pl's also doing doing grants and investments cool so happy hacking and yeah there's a lot of great opportunities to build with these magical storage free storage superpowers have fun yes

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