Opening Remarks & Panel: Business Opportunities on the Storage Side | Storage Provider's Summit

Welcome everyone. My name is Cartik . And I'm Luke, and we'll be your masters of ceremonies today at the Storage Provider Summit. We couldn't be happier to have you all here with us today. So, we're watching all of this on eglobal.

tv. And for those who are joining us for the first time, this is the platform we will be using for all of today's talks. We encourage you all to log in and interact with our speakers. You can ask questions here and we will forward them directly to all of our lectures. For everyone who logs in and participates, we will also be distributing a commemorative NFT token.

So, don't forget to say "hi" to us, as well as to the speakers and the global team. This summit is part of HackFS, a month-long event that includes a hackathon and several summits. For the hackathon, we have over 650 developers from 61 different countries, spanning 18 time zones, building the latest and greatest in IPFS and Filecoin, and everything that is creatively possible now with Web3. And also as part of this hackathon, we are holding two summits to highlight the amazing things happening in the Protocol Labs ecosystem. Last Friday, the 6th, we held our Builder's Day, and today we're going to focus on storage providers and talk about that side of the ecosystem.

So, let's get down to business today. We have some amazing talks coming up in the next few hours and we're very excited to share what we'll be covering. We'll start the day by talking about the business opportunities on the storage side, with a panel covering different aspects of being a storage provider. Next, we will have another panel on what it means to invest in Web3 startups and what investors think when looking to build and finance companies. Next, we'll have ZX talking about what it means to build a bridge with Filecoin and all the new possibilities with Web3.

Next, we'll have Michelle covering how you can take advantage of grant opportunities in the IPFS and Filecoin ecosystem and promote your projects in a way that isn't diluted. And lastly a way that isn't diluted. And lastly , we'll have Deep and Gail talking about Filecoin Plus. They have some amazing announcements planned for you today. And I can't wait for everyone to share the amazing things they want.

So, let 's go straight to our first lecture. Uh, this panel was designed lecture. Uh, this panel was designed , or rather, titled " Business Opportunities and the Storage Side," Business Opportunities and the Storage Side," and we have Charles, Stewart, Kevin, and Neo as our panelists. And Stefan will be moderating this chat. And I'll let Stefan and all our panelists introduce themselves now.

So, without further ado, please welcome all of our panelists. I'm going to ask you all to turn on your videos and we'll go straight to our conversation. Perfect. Thank you very much, Cardig. Before we begin today, first of all, welcome.

I'm very excited to discuss in a little more detail the business opportunities from the storage provider side . I want to talk about how I see the Filecoin ecosystem. Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to observe the sky with one of my friends, who is an astronomer. And you know, when you live in a city like I do here in San Francisco, it can be hazy, it can be very difficult, due to light pollution, to see the stars in the sky. We were sort of wandering through the sky with this new telescope.

And we ended up arriving at this really cool region called the Omega Nebula. While I was trying to explain to him what Filecoin is and what we do here day after day, he was trying to explain to me all the different galaxies and the cool things he works on as an astronomer. We ended up in the Omega Nebula as the place where we connected, because if you look at this region because if you look at this region , it's one of the brightest and most massive star-forming regions closest to our galaxy that we know of today. And she creates all these new stars. And when I was looking at it, I thought, "Hey, what's that called?"

He said, "Well, it's the Omega Nebula. It's a stellar nursery." And I thought, " stellar nursery." And I thought, " Wow, that's exactly how I see Filecoin, right? What we're doing here at HackFS, what we're doing with the whole ecosystem, is exactly that.

We're building new companies. We're building new stars." And you know, I thought that was really cool. And we also had a long conversation about how he should store all these images, because, in fact, this is a real image from this telescope here in my backyard, taken two weeks ago. How he was supposed to store it on Filecoin, of course.

So that's the next conversation we'll have with his engineers. So have with his engineers. So today we want to focus on how innovation happens across the entire Filecoin universe, not just on the front end, creating new applications, but also looking at the storage provider side . There are many opportunities there. Regarding storage providers, we now have over 2,700 and growing every day.

We thought it would be interesting to bring some providers to the table and discuss where innovation can also happen in this context. So, as we analyze this universe, we'll talk a bit more about infrastructure as a service, data integration, data protection, etc., as we integrate more clients into our platform. So, let me welcome Neo, Charles, Kevin, and Stuart to our panel session today. And I'm very happy to have them here.

So, let's start with a first question for Neo. Neo, are you part of IPFS Main? You have a lot of power in Filecoin. You have added a lot of Filecoin power to the network. What interests me is that you started in China, but can you tell us a little more about how IPFS Main has reinvented itself since the beginning of the mainnet and where you see opportunities for some of these new startups?

Yes definitely. Thank you very much, Stephan, for the great introduction. Here's a fun fact about me: when I was a kid, my dream job was to be an astronaut piloting spaceships among the stars, and those galaxies you're showing me are truly beautiful. Yes. So, just a brief introduction about me.

I'm Neo G, from IPFS Main. We are one of the sponsors of HackFS 2021 and we also sponsored this same hackathon last year. The reason we like HackFS so much is that we find it a great place to find new business opportunities in cyberspace. Both IPFS Main and I invested in HackFS projects last year and plan to do the same this year. Well, as a storage provider, what we used to call a miner.

We've been with the Filecoin network since its inception and currently have over 300 petabytes of capacity, with plans to expand globally. Currently, over 90% of our capacity is located in China, and from the customer's perspective, it's not good practice to have such centralized storage, even if it's distributed across different data centers, as it's still within the same continent. Well, most storage customers focus on availability and durability. So, we built a complete suite of Lotus optimization algorithms and storage solutions to ensure that customer data is available when needed and protected against failures and errors. But and protected against failures and errors.

But , more importantly, we began to shift our focus to supporting other regions, such as North America and Europe, despite differing policies that are either favorable or unfavorable to cryptocurrencies. I believe that the global expansion of the Filecoin storage service is inevitable in the long term. Therefore, we are happy and eager to work with local Filecoin storage provider groups across different continents, leveraging our expertise in Filecoin storage services. Excellent. Thanks.

That's fantastic to hear, and I think you raised a very good point: it's a very strong community, right? So, multiple storage providers work together in various regions. When designing products or solutions, you need to keep this in mind because, as you mentioned, customers seek to protect their data across various regions, countries their data across various regions, countries , etc. The other thing you mentioned, which I want to comment on, is that we call this a " storage provider" panel because, as you said, the community created a proposal to change the terminology from "miner to change the terminology from "miner " to "storage provider" to be closer to the end customer, since that's exactly what you do: provide a storage service. And now, I want to bring Charles.

Thank you very much, Nia. Charles, the next question is for you. Your company has evolved, in a way, from being just a storage provider to also being a solutions provider. When working with corporate companies, you've noticed that data integration isn't always easy. So, you've found ways to innovate and help your clients integrate data faster.

Can you give us an example of the challenges you faced in providing a good storage service, and what applications you developed? Please tell us about it, because you have some great projects over there. Yes, the first one is based in Montreal, Canada. We were a storage provider and offered around 10 nodes in North America for different types of data from our clients. Earlier this year, we noticed that many customers have a strong interest in Filecoin storage.

Since Ficoin has verified data and can offer it almost for free to all customers, they heard the news and were thrilled. However, there was a barrier for them, because these industrial clients usually come from, for example, big data processing or machine learning; They have a high demand for data. But the existing infrastructure was built on centralized cloud platforms, such as Amazon and Google Cloud. What they want is for their engineers to be able to migrate to Filecoin effortlessly. This means they need some framework or platform tools to help with this migration platform tools to help with this migration .

I'll give the example of a local AI company called Twin-site AI. They work with algorithms. They have a huge amount of data labeling on their network. Currently, storage on AWS costs thousands of dollars per month for storage alone. But when they migrate to Filecoin, the first question is whether their data scientists are accustomed to using S3 as a framework.

So they upload and download, and there are many tools developed based on S3. Now, the question is what if they can't easily make this migration with an off-the-shelf solution. For example, on Monday, they were too afraid to do it. So what we do is build the complete solution for them. We are building the caching layer so they can upload and speed up access to data from storage to the computing environment.

We are creating an S3-compatible interface , which we call FS3. It's a gateway for migrating your existing data from AWS to IPFS, and then via Filecoin backup to the Filecoin network, with minimal human interaction. We are also building the preparation environment for them to protect the data in a caching environment, encrypting it before uploading it to the Filecoin network. With this, we also provide access via API, because developers are accustomed to this type of access, unlike typical end users who use the web interface. So they want to have that type of access, in addition to permission-based access to some specific data.

Therefore, with all this help, they will be able to begin the migration. We also help them apply for developer grants while they are building the tool. Therefore, they receive support from the Filecoin Foundation. Another interesting thing is that they have a company currently located in China that uses Alicloud as a bridge to send data from China to Canada, which generates a huge cost when using this transfer protocol, since Alicloud charges a high amount of money for cross-border transmission. With Filecoin, we have many nodes, more than 3,000, and storage providers worldwide, and we have a strong presence in China.

So, all of them, or most of them, are willing to provide these services for free. With this advantage, they are able to reduce their costs by 70% without impacting their business. That's why we see FVM and IPFS as great tools, but we, as solution providers but we, as solution providers , really need to offer excellent tools to accelerate your development. Excellent. I liked that you brought up several important points here.

First, what I'm hearing is that storage providers like yourselves are also innovating by bringing more interfaces and making it easier for customers to integrate . Furthermore, secondly, ingesting, or rather, outputting data from current cloud providers is expensive. Any help we can give to make this easier, so that more data can be ingested in different formats, is important, because one of Filecoin's differentiators is its unique ID, and it doesn't matter if it came through an S3 interface, a virtual file system, or a custom SDK. Legal. Thanks.

Thank you for that, Charles. So Kevin, you're at the Picnic. One of the things you've already mentioned is that the provider community is very strong provider community is very strong , right? Highly interconnected. One thing that continues to impress me is how collaborative everyone is.

For this panel as well, it was very easy to get everyone's support to communicate and participate in this discussion. You've certainly been involved in integrating and moving large datasets of customer data, on the petabyte scale. Can you give us some examples and teach the team what you've seen there? Yes, certainly. I wanted to acknowledge that, throughout my years participating in the blockchain space, the Filecoin ecosystem is undoubtedly one of the most collaborative open-source communities .

First, thank you to Stefan Protocol and HackFest for inviting the Picnic team to today's panel. A brief introduction. Picnic is a cloud storage company based in San Diego, and our mission is to set the enterprise standard for web3 infrastructure. So that today's blockchains don't need to create nodes and validate data on Amazon Web Services, using centralized infrastructure. So, ah, about what you said, you know, at Picnic, we're very fortunate to be part of several teams across the Filecoin ecosystem, helping some of the coolest pioneers integrate their datasets into Filecoin.

The first example that comes to mind is the Starling Lab, which is a joint venture between the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California and the Stanford Department of Engineering. And they aim to protect humanity's history by leveraging Filecoin as the archiving layer for their data stack archiving layer for their data stack . So, my team and I have been supporting them in preparing, among many other things, for the relocation of their datasets, moving them from where they are today, you know, starting with tape storage. Okay, when you have petabytes of data, it 's not easy to digitize everything. Especially if you're talking on that scale, it's not easy to obtain data at that proportion.

It's not easy sending them to multiple storage providers—when we say 3,000 on Filecoin, how do you get them there, right, through a blockchain network, so that Starling can enjoy decentralization and redundancy of copies? But that will happen. It's already happening. It's been brilliant. Hmm, so it's been a really exciting time for all of us in the Filecoin community.

I can think of many other projects we're working on, but I'll stop here so we can share some time with others on the panel. Yes, great, great, Kevin. So, basically, data management, as you said, right? And data integration, just like with other cloud offerings today, when you're moving petabytes of capacity, you want to move fast. Sometimes, "sneakernet move fast.

Sometimes, "sneakernet " (physical transport) is the fastest way to do it. But, you know, the whole data management aspect surrounding this is where we see a lot of opportunities. And I think that will also be impacted by changes in some way. Moreover, all traditional tools today cost a lot of money; If you go to some of the traditional ones... I don't want to mention names, but I think there are many opportunities there as well.

Stu, thank you very much, Kevin. Stu, you were one of the first to adopt Filecoin, right, and you have extensive experience in network security. What recommendations do you have for the staff here and for the public when it comes to safety nets in this space? I think you're on mute. Someone had to do it.

So, I hope everyone has heard that there was a major break-in at Poly Networks yesterday. It's a DeFi provider, and $600 million in their assets were stolen, but most of it has already been recovered. It's an interesting story. So, security issues are always appearing in the news lately. Well, I want to analyze some parts of this.

Firstly, if we start with the blockchain itself and Filecoin, this is already well proven. It has been fully tested. We don't see any security problems there. So, we're not worried about it. But then we look at the different components, such as storage providers.

Like at Picnic, you know, we have to worry about the physical security of the hardware. We have to worry about all the things a normal provider would worry about, such as denial-of-service attacks and protecting incoming P2P connections on the network using some kind of firewall. Of course, you strengthen your operating system, protecting all the systems it's running to ensure security; So the other component is the client side, and in our ecosystem, the client is the one that sends data to the Filecoin network for the storage provider. Therefore, this needs to be protected. One of the major concerns we have, and I think the Poly Network breach alerts us to this, is the protection of their wallets.

So you have to do everything, from ensuring that others can't access them, to making proper use of the wallets where you store them, and of course, protecting the keys and not losing them. So, everything you would expect from a normal operation. You know, backups, backups of those keys, of those wallets. And then, on the network side, as Kevin mentioned, we're talking about large volumes of data. So, if we just look at the transfer of one PiB of data, one petabyte of data, if you have a 10 gigabit internet connection, it takes about nine days to move one PiB.

And on the internal side, the network requirements are even greater. Typically network requirements are even greater. Typically , we're talking about internal connections of 40 to 100 gigabits per second due to the enormous amounts of data involved. So, I hope that's a good overview. Thanks.

Yes. No, great, Stuart. I think you know that what you 're highlighting is, you know, in every stack, in every layer, in every step of implementing a systems or storage provider infrastructure, you see opportunities for improvement. Come on, let's go back to Neo for improvement. Come on, let's go back to Neo .

So Neo, where do you think the future of web3 or leaders should focus when building new businesses overseas, and perhaps what is your vision from the perspective of IPFS main? Well, technically there are two types of tools: application and infrastructure. I believe both are equally important to the web3 ecosystem, and in the current Filecoin network , there is much more capacity than storage. This means there is a huge amount of essentially free capacity for hackers to use if they choose to use a web3-based network. With free storage or even potentially negative pricing—well, it's a FIP proposal that allows storage providers to set negative prices for verified storage deals, and this will unlock many innovative applications or smart contracts built directly on the Filecoin network, after the integration of FVM, EVM, or other virtual machines.

Regarding infrastructure, in addition to the data management that Kevin mentioned earlier, I believe that as more storage providers begin to accept actual storage contracts, contract management tools will become extremely useful, especially for large-scale storage providers . Content filtering systems will also be essential. People will start to realize how important this is when data violates local legislation. Many storage providers in China hesitate when they can't verify the data, so they simply don't accept storage contracts. Furthermore storage contracts.

Furthermore , as mentioned earlier, composite DeFi could accept market orders, such as bids, trades, offers, and leverage a DEX ( decentralized exchange) to see how the market actually values ​​these orders. And with this type of capability, the ecosystem will be able to start creating the future of hardware. You can create futures for hard drives, SSDs, GPUs, and so on, or even space-time futures, which is amazing since you could actually create futures about the storage contracts themselves. I'm super excited to see what will happen when this comes up. Very cool.

Yes. No, I think you brought up some very good points, such as filtering and qualifying data in an automated and scalable way. Well, you know, ensuring that certain data is legitimate, etc. And also optimization across the entire backend stack optimization across the entire backend stack , like tuning for the hardware, there are definitely many opportunities in chipsets, custom chipsets and all that, which will eventually help us move forward and offer more computing capabilities in the future. Hmm, thank you.

So, let's go back to Charles. Charles, one of the things you're a big advocate for is how you're building the service stack and managing to compete with hyperscalers. Any suggestions or opportunities regarding where startups should focus to help the Filecoin ecosystem compete with hyperscalers Filecoin ecosystem compete with hyperscalers ? You have some very specific points to address regarding this. Come on, let's talk about it.

Yes, we are very excited to work with the Filecoin network because we see great opportunities in it. In my opinion, the Filecoin network is not only one of the largest, or perhaps the largest, storage network. It also has numerous computing resources. Memory, GPU, and CPU, all high-performance servers. With all these resources, we are not only building one of the largest storage networks, we are becoming one of the largest computing networks in the world.

This means that, potentially, the network could compete with all existing cloud systems , such as AWS, Google, Azure, and whatever else. There are many limitations to these centralized cloud systems, in addition to them being closed-source, which means you don't know what they're doing behind the scenes. Did they steal your data? Are they using your privacy for commercial purposes? Do they privacy for commercial purposes?

Do they ...Do your data really belong to you? We want to recover your data, where you got it from... you don't know all these questions. But with Filecoin, everything is open source.

If you have any questions, you can check the code. If you want to add something, you can write your own code and deploy it on the network own code and deploy it on the network . That being said, we currently have almost 700 active nodes on the network that you can access, and over 200 nodes accepting data. Imagine how many data centers AWS and Google have; There are only 20 data centers worldwide. How many regions do we frequently reach?

If you check Hack FS, today we crossed 1800 time zones. We have over 600 teams and many storage providers around the world. We can build the largest decentralized network for storage and computing. Therefore, for the many startups that want to join this large network, you can think about how to transform all the services that current cloud providers offer to fit into our network. For example, Livepeer, they do live video streaming and transfer, right?

They can use the Filecoin network for pure mining the Filecoin network for pure mining . What's happening now? As storage providers using FS3, we are trying to replace the current S3 storage . We are also building an edge computing infrastructure to replace the AWS Snowboard family of services. And there are still thousands of opportunities for CDN services, CloudFront services, cloud monitoring services, and other services such as load balancers and activities that are currently provided by AWS or other cloud services.

We can do this on a private network, which is even better, as we have many storage providers with verified data. You get free storage; Can we get free computing in the future as well? I would say it's possible. We need a good economic model. We have more potential economic model.

We have more potential ; Consider decentralization driven by a community-based economic model compared to these companies focused solely on profit. That 's a big advantage. And also trust; we have more trust than they do because we are open source. For everyone. Storage goes beyond that; your data is your data.

Your data is currently held by AWS. Yes. So, these are the opportunities and the focus that I think startups should work on to expand the entire community and network. Thanks. Thank you, Charles.

And one thing I know you and I have talked about, but you've already mentioned, is the infrastructure as a service that you intend to build over time as a storage provider. So, it's not just what we 're seeing now in the world of storage providers; you 're not just a Filecoin storage provider . You are, in fact, building additional services with other blockchains. And so, you can see all of our storage providers as the future managed service providers of the next decade, who will have multiple blockchain stacks working collaboratively in the same data center, offering all kinds of services. But it all starts with obtaining that data first, because that's where the magic happens, right?

So, bringing computing closer to the data, as you said, is quite interesting. The next question is for, thank you. Thank you, Charles. I'm very excited to see what your team is working on and what you'll be releasing next. Let's move on to Kevin.

So, what are some of the problems you're seeing, Kevin, and what are the business opportunities you would recommend the teams focus on? Yes, that's a very good question. Well, I think, as Charles and the speakers before me said, it's about better integrations and designing solutions that make sense for the market as it is today. He mentioned many of the big keywords, many of the big players, the hyperscalers. I mean, as part of the Web 3.

0 trend, okay, it's decentralized. It has different technological requirements to function different technological requirements to function , but there is this chasm, this void, where your current web2 user (the people accustomed to using hyperscalars) is, and then there are web3 technologies like Filecoin, and you need to cross that if you are one of today's data generators or storage users. I mean, we, all of us on this call, are used to these cloud tools, like Amazon's S3, or from the point of view of, I don't know, the thousands, tens of thousands of storage architects, systems administrators everywhere , whether academic, governmental, or private. We all use the same data carriers repeatedly, the same few names. You have backup and restore, you have Rclone, Rubrik, NetBackup, and that's it, right?

There are so many business opportunities if an entrepreneur like one of you in the audience can fill that gap I mentioned. So, you can build the arsenal of tools that allows web2 users to not even realize they've migrated to web3. They overcame that void because they are now on Filecoin. It's simply perfect like this. Furthermore, in this sense, another matter is knowing how to use or interact with Filecoin, or any web3 technology.

If you 're used to web2, they are proprietary, but you're used to them. And you. I mean, the MSPs went there, the coaches, the big hyperscalers created business development for training sessions for the different segments. But with web3, with Filecoin, you need to understand wallet management, tokenomics, etc., the list goes on.

An entrepreneurial idea would be to disaggregate these new knowledge requirements into a new system function so that, again, the web2 user wouldn't even realize they've migrated to web3. They just know that their data is decentralized. They can pay in fiat US dollars to the storage provider FCON or, for example, to Charles' team, which integrates many different things for Finland as part of the offerings. Hmm, and that's a completely separate role in the web3 ecosystem. Hmm, and I think the last thing I wanted to mention, you said the word opportunity, uh, I think that's just tremendous.

I want to take a step back and really paint a picture of the scale of cloud storage. I am really sorry. Hey Kevin, sorry to interrupt you. You hear a lot of static noise coming from the microphone. I'm not sure if you were excited there.

I love that, by the way. I hate, I hate interrupting you because you're bringing up, uh, great, um you're bringing up, uh, great, um , you're bringing up great, great topics there. Wait, can you check your microphone quickly and then we'll, we 'll try again. Yes. How's that going?

How are things now? Oh, perfect. Fantastic. Okay. Yes.

My apologies. Hmm, I just wanted to make sure that I made that point clear to all of you in the audience. One of the most incredible opportunities is simply breaking into a new role, the ability to handle all the new knowledge requirements and support people who are seamlessly transitioning from web two to web three . I think that was the last point. I hope I've left that out point.

I hope I've left that out , uh, sure. Hmm, and then just Stefan, I think my last point was, um, uh, you mentioned the word opportunity. Well, coming from the traditional world of Wall Street, management, consulting, private equity, I always think about market opportunity, take a really quick step back and paint a picture of how big an opportunity cloud storage is. Okay, so today's public, governmental, and private clouds hold approximately 100,000 exabytes of stored data. This is insane.

Well, in four years, that number will at least double to 200,000 according to some of the leading research groups such as Cyber ​​Security Ventures, Allied Market, Markets and Markets. I mean, estimates are that in 2027, 2028, cloud storage will mark, it will surpass the US$300 billion mark, which is like a CAGR of around 22, 23%. Think about it, everyone. Even if Web 3 takes a while to take off, which isn't the case, right? You heard Neo.

I mean, his team has been around for, what, a little over a year, two years, from the testnet to the mainnet, they're at 230 petabytes the mainnet, they're at 230 petabytes . The growth is incredible. But even if it takes a while to take off, which is not the case. Filecoin is only a small fraction of that, which it isn't. The addressable market will still be a gigantic one-hundred-billion- dollar opportunity for entrepreneurs who help transition from web two to web three.

So, I implore you all to seize this opportunity and, seriously, get your hands dirty. Very cool. Very cool. Thanks. Thank you, Kevin.

I completely agree. Well, the next question is for Stu. People sometimes ask why, you know, Filecoin doesn't have cryptography built into the stack? What is your response to that? Because I'm sure you have an opinion on this.

Yes definitely. So, I think the issue is a bit more complicated than people imagine. When I hear a question like "Why don't you encrypt the data?" Well, there are actually four actors in this ecosystem actually four actors in this ecosystem . You know, there's the protocol itself, right .

You know, there's the protocol itself, right ? The Filecoin protocol. And when you analyze the objective, the purpose is to allow you to store data in a decentralized way around the world decentralized way around the world , so people can use a decentralized storage platform. The other two actors, however, are the client and what I will call the consumer. So, the client is the component that accepts consumer data, processes it, and sends it to the storage provider, and there's an opportunity there.

There is a business opportunity in managing these customer relationships and expectations. So, if you want to encrypt it there, it can be encrypted and sent to the storage miner as an encrypted block, right? We simply store it, and then they can manage their permissions in terms of, you know, who can access it terms of, you know, who can access it , who gets the key, how they obtain the key. And finally, the consumers, the people we talk to, don't actually want to use encryption, even if they have confidential data that they don't want publicly exposed, because they're afraid of a single point of failure if something happens to that key. Suddenly, where is our data?

Do you know where, and who has the key? Ah, you know, it needs to be managed properly. So, they don't want to take that risk. Therefore don't want to take that risk. Therefore , it really is up to the consumer and the client to decide how, um, how to negotiate these requirements and then where this encryption, if it is to happen, where it occurs and how it is managed.

Yes. Very cool. Yes. I think, you know , it's like you said, right? Each, each, um...

there's an opportunity, again, at every stage. And, um, even, you know, different encryption technologies can be added to the front or back. And I think, you know, again, it's an example of how we think about the ecosystem, how we believe that, you know, innovation will happen over time and change over time, um, throughout the ecosystem. Excellent. Unfortunately, we're, um, short on time here, but, you know, I wanted to make sure there were any questions in the chat.

We have a few more questions in the queue as well. But let's get ready for the next panel session. In the meantime, I'll hand the floor over to Cardik, who will look at other questions that have come in via chat, and I'll be back with you in two minutes. In the meantime, Cardik can take over. Thank you all for participating in at least the panel session, and I'll be back in two minutes.

Well, that was an amazing lecture and so many fantastic points were made here. We will answer anyone who has questions in the chat; feel free to type them in. We will pass these questions on to our speakers these questions on to our speakers . I saw some really interesting points here and, um, I would still ask that you keep your videos running. Hmm, so maybe a question for everyone until we get a few more questions here: it's just in terms of you guys having spoken just in terms of you guys having spoken , you've covered a lot of opportunities that exist here, whether it's about the opportunity of the space itself, about storage, or auxiliary tools around, but, um.

What, what specifically do I think keeps you up at night, and what do you worry about, um? And maybe I'll start with Charles and then we can move on to Kevin, but what are the things that concern you as this ecosystem grows and, um, what matters on that side? Yes, for me, like, with the current state of the internet, let's remember that Filecoin has only been online for a year, not even a year yet. So there was still a lot to do, like the infrastructure protocol layers, there's still a lot that continues to evolve. So, when startups begin their design process and need to consider the long term, we kind of, like, we start the project, hope it's perfect, and then it will work the way you envisioned.

What I see is that some young developers and startups come here very excited and say, "Oh, this isn't the page, oh, that page," and they start to feel a little anxious. What I see is that if you think something isn't there, you can do two things. It's one thing to create open-source code, create libraries from the core operators, and open them up to others so that we can make the network evolve rapidly. Another important thing is to always think long-term; When you're writing code or doing something similar, think: how would others do this? Is this a real need or is it just because I like it?

I think that would be great, but where are the real needs? Always do your research before you begin. Well, that's something I 'm thinking about. Another part is about security; When we are creating these applications aimed at industrial use, the industrial users accept these solutions in terms of security. I see many great things, but they don't think about security, for example, how to protect our customers' data.

And what about the legal issues? These are things that really worry me. Kevin, I see there's active engagement in the chat here with you and some of our other participants, so maybe I'll ask you here as well, for the live stream: what keeps you up at night? Yes, I don't know if you were reading the chat and asked the question, so perfect. The first thing that comes to mind, and I mean, just to make it clear to all of us who don't understand the expression, is that it generally has a negative connotation.

What keeps you up at night? We are all working so hard in the hacker community and the web3 community to make decentralization work for cloud storage or even more ambitious goals, cloud computing, etc. The infrastructure that exists today, which we colloquially call web2, has matured considerably in different legal jurisdictions, in terms of security, and it 's not just a matter of ethics or legislation; There was also a lot of work involved in keeping the systems functional and technically sound, in ways that offer safety and comfort to their users. In the chat, I mean , I think Vibbop, thank you for being so active. Vibb mentioned role-based access management.

RBAC control doesn't really exist today because we're hacking very fast, building very fast, at least increasing capacity, but we also need to ensure we're covering all the points. It's not just a matter of responsibility just a matter of responsibility , but to encourage users, you need to protect their data. What keeps me up at night—and a better perspective on this would be: what is the opportunity here—is that the hackers in the community see the need to bring the same professionalism and the same security standards. But somehow, they have to be creative and make it work on a decentralized platform like Filecoin. So, I think that's my answer, and it's a great opportunity.

It's not my area of ​​expertise, but I'm sure someone in the audience would be great at it, if they aren't already working on it . For sure. And I think that overlaps with what you just mentioned, Stuart, about cryptography in space. So maybe I'll let you comment too, and then we'll move on to Neo to wrap things up. Of course.

Comment on cryptography or security. It's music to my ears. Everyone is talking about security. Either one. The question remains: what keeps you awake at night?

Yes. I always try to understand the risks and balance them, you know? So, it's really about managing risk really about managing risk . Trying to understand what those risks are. At the moment, I would say that much of our attention is focused on government regulations.

Some of the hearings in the Senate and the new amendments being proposed or approved clearly present the type of risk we need to be concerned about and how it affects us, as opposed to the traditional infrastructure and application risks we always have to worry about. So, these would be my answers: simply what's out there, what's coming, and how the environment is constantly changing. As someone who has worked extensively in the corporate world, I continue to evangelize the fact that blockchain technology offers us far greater security than the Web 2.0 way of doing things. I spend millions of dollars trying to protect what, in a way, is impossible to protect; There are many loopholes that can allow you to be hacked, often on a social level, not just at the code level.

So, seeing a protocol like Filecoin or other blockchains where security is built into the protocol and you don't depend on people you can trust depend on people you can trust , you know? It's a truly trustless system. So now we're looking outside the protocol, right? Off-chain problems right? Off-chain problems .

For sure. And Neo, uh, maybe he'll end this here. I'd love to hear your opinions as well. Yes. Yes.

Uh, I, I, I think you've covered almost everything. Um, what keeps you awake at night? Uh, well, that's actually a classic interview question. Uh, uh, one of the appropriate answers is, aside from, you know, uh, occasional nightmares about interviews, uh, I work so much that I rarely have trouble sleeping. Uh, but when you ask executives this question, you might get answers like, uh, uh, team dynamics, uh, talent issues, uh, uh, corporate culture, and people-related matters.

Well, for me, the real answer is how to achieve effective communication when our team is distributed across different regions, uh, with different time zones. I personally started working remotely four years ago, long before the COVID pandemic, but I'm still trying to improve my highly effective communication skills. Um, I think Protocol Lab seems pretty good at this, and if you're on the global scene, uh, Stephen, uh, do you have any tips to share? Neo, that's me. Yes, that's Neo.

Yes. Uh, jumping into the hints. I think, you know, to continue building the community as strong as possible. I strongly believe that, you know, innovation arises from, you know, exchanging ideas with each other, working collaboratively, and brainstorming about doing things in a new way. And I feel like some of the greatest ideas just come about when we're having a beer or, you know, just when you're not really focused on brainstorming, but when you're just trying to make something work and actually solving a problem.

I think, you know, that's why we invest so much in hackathons. We invest heavily in accelerator programs, and very much in building this together with the ecosystem. So, I want to thank everyone for coming. Great conversation. Again, we should do more of these.

I hope this has been helpful.