Filecoin Plus: Verifying, Incentivizing, and Onboarding Useful Data | Deep Kapur & Galen McAndrew

thanks all right so um hope all of you are enjoying the rest of the day um we are one talk away from today's summit before we finish everything and um i'd like to invite our next two speakers uh up here so uh our last talk of the day is going to be about fall coin plus uh and deep and galen will talk about what falkland pluses and their as they're on the faucet plus team and just what it means to verify incentivize um and onboard useful data so uh we have both of them here now and i'll ask them to turn on their video and get us started welcome thanks kozak really excited to be here all right let's make sure deep let's see my screen i can see your screen sweet um looks like we're going to go ahead and jump in thanks for that intro uh as you said talking about five coin plus verifying incentivizing and onboarding useful data uh onto the filecoin network i'm gaming mcandrew i'm the filecoin foundation and the fileclean foundation for the decentralized web uh with me co-presenting is deep kapoor he's with protocol labs we kind of dual attack this project and work on it from you know both the social engineering and the technical infrastructure side and it is all open source and community driven processes so we're excited to tell you guys about it and how you can get involved and then we'll have time for questions um at the end but if anything comes up or we're going too fast or you have a burning urine question feel free to just pause us and jump in all right so to that end our agenda uh with the time that we have we're gonna go over just what is fill plus you may see it written this way big f little i little l plus that's the filecoin plus program talk about how it works and its core mechanisms and concepts go over some of the kind of incentive mechanisms how this fits into that marketplace ecosystem and then talk to you about what you need to do to get data cap and then how you could get involved with the program a couple different ways so why don't we launch into it basically a like short answer is that falcon plus adds a layer of social trust to the file filecoin network to incentivize useful storage we're going to unpack what some of these things mean as concepts the core mechanism is different actors different entities that could be an individual or it could be an organization play a role and essentially the allocation and spending of data cap so this graphic kind of highlights in a complicated way all of those interactions you don't need to memorize this to understand how the system works um but effectively through community governance model people can apply to be a notary those messages will go to some root key holders to approve it and sign messages on the chain so they have this audit trail and then notaries have the ability to allocate that data cap to clients and then clients are going to seal deals with storage providers and those views are going to be verified through the miniature of datacad so it is a novel resource that is like i said granted to notaries then down to uh clients and then clients use it in addition to phil to make deals it is not the same as some other currencies or tokens because it is a single use credit so it is not a currency that is going to flow or that you could go purchase it is consumed as it's used and it can't be transferred so it's more like saying like i've gotten kind of a coupon or a stamp that i'm gonna then be able to use in these kinds of transactions um and the way that it works downstream to the storage providers is they are going to get extra rewards by serving deals with datacap so we'll jump into how that functions so deep yeah let's jump into a little bit more so looking at like filecoin as a network today um it's the supply side of the market is primarily served by storage providers that make storage available to the network effectively so they have access storage available or they're built out data centers which they're willing to rent out space over a period of time on effectively and so clients are in the market are effectively looking at ways in which um they are able to utilize these services spread out geographically with different availability concepts standards uh compliance etc to identify storage providers that they would like to work with in addition or as an alternative to uh cloud storage options that may exist for those particular clients and so the way the network incentivizes the existence of supply and especially during like this initial growth phase of the falco network was effectively looking at how much relative storage as a storage provider you are serving to the network um especially with regards to what everybody else is bringing to the table so effectively filecoin does a lottery or something close to one where it looks at the amount of power you have and power is measured as both a combination of the quantity of the amount of data you're making or space you're making available but also the quality of what you are stealing on the network and based on how much power you are making available to the network you are more or less likely to win block rewards so every epoch in falcon which is 30 seconds several search providers have the opportunity to win block rewards and the likelihood of you winning block rewards is directly influenced by your relative power on the network so now that you have like the basic sort of economics of the supply side down let's talk about the incentives of the supply side and why falcon plus leverages or what it actually leverages to make a storage experience for a client more friction free effectively so today as a storage provider you have the option to just make uh your space available or you're bringing on space to the network because you already know that you're going to seal a client's data in it so that's the difference between just sealing a sector versus stealing a deal in a sector and the benefits of serving a deal are that you actually get additional revenue so not only is the network compensating you for making supply available to the rest of the market but also you're earning money from the actual deal from a client because that client is going to pay you as you're offering them a service of storage uh so for the period of time that you're giving them storage as a service they're paying you uh you know put ebok effectively in falcon and additionally if a lot of people come to retrieve the data that's being stored so say it's like a public good like open data set so like covet data or environmental change data etc access that data itself can also be like paid for like the way you would expect from the cdn every time you go and actually test that data the provider that's actually giving you that data is taking opportunity cost on bandwidth dedicating hardware resources to ensure that your data gets transferred and then just in general making sure that they stay available online for you to access that data as well so that also yields additional revenue but this tends to come with liability as well right because as a storage provider you own the hardware on which somebody else's data is now being stored so not only do you have to deal with getting that data onto your hardware but also the implications of storing that data over a period of time and so while there's concepts already in the falcon deal making network around like content policy in terms of service and conditions in which a deal can actually happen it still is additional work like it's very simple for a storage provider to start out by just saying hey you know i've got a new hard disk of x terabytes that i'm just going to upload to the network and make available for supply down the line rather than having to negotiate with a client upfront identify what they'd like to store on behalf of that client and like turn it into a deal as it comes to network and what we see in the market is that price is effectively set as a combination of needing to offset these additional costs that come from making a deal which includes like the potential liabilities and then obviously the fact that it's an open market uh which tends to drive pricing down at least in the nature of the market today or you'll start to look at falcoid plus as an alternative where uh if clients come to a storage provider after going through the falcon plus like program where they've received this resource data cap that galen just talked about data cap effectively becomes like an alternate form of payment for a deal so it could be used in addition to filecoin or in place of filecoin but it's a completely independent value that's being set where a client can say yes i got datacap and i'm going to use datacap on this deal and the way a miner interprets that is basically that like the likelihood of how storing that data for them will um you know increase their presence on the change is boosted by 10 basically so there's a 10x multiplier on the storage that they're actually offering to the client that's coming and compensating them effectively in data cap and so miners become significantly more incentivized to choose to provide storage to specific clients that are coming with data cap so not only does it offset uh some of the liabilities by making it much more lucrative for a storage provider uh but also these clients are going through a vetting process to even receive that data cap in the first place which we'll be talking about soon after uh so it also reduces like any of the risks that a search provider may actually be taking on by creating a deal or having a long-term partnership even with a specific client and network and so as a result we end up seeing that clients that are willing to go through the process with and plus to receive data cap are more easily able to identify search providers that they can work with and also tend to receive storage at extremely low low prices so the main takeaway for you here um if you want to switch the next is actually that like storage providers uh are willing to effectively provide free storage for verified clients that go through the falcon plus system because the incentives that the falcon plus program creates for them uh outweigh the short-term costs both on board a client and their data to the network and then seal it and maintain it over a period of time so it's become a very interesting and useful lever uh for clients that are willing to go through the process to ensure that they are receiving the best possible deal when coming to store that data on far coin and it also helps miners were able to offset their risks and increase their rewards over period time so what does it actually mean to get data cap as a client so data cap as galen said you know it's it's a resource that basically gets allocated to a client and it's single use only so you you need to go get it from somebody who can actually give it to you and if you recall on that diagram there's this role of a notary um and so notaries are elected through like a community election process and granted a certain amount of data gap that they can dispense over a period of time to clients and so you as a client or a developer in the falcon network um either you want you already have an address to which you'd like to go and make deals from and so you'd like to go that data cap to that address or you're acting on behalf of like an additional user down the line like say you're building a service on the network or something that interacts with ether or different blockchains and you want to ensure that you are able to get the cheapest possible deal for you or for your users on the network depending on whether or not you're using your address or somebody else's address you're going to go and try and get data cap for that and so we interpret or we we like to think of this path as like three stages the first of which is getting a very small amount of data cap with a very minimal investment um through what is called like an auto notary or an automated notary one such notary that a lot of people use exists at verify.glyph.io what that particular program does is it basically checks to see that you have a valid github account that has existed for more than six months and assuming you don't go to it more frequently than once every 30 days i believe it will give you 32 uh gibby bytes of data cap uh in the next possible like message that'll land on chain so that typically takes about 30 seconds uh and so that's extremely useful because that's the size of like the average sector that a storage provider actually offers and on the network which means that on average like the deals that you're going to make are always going to be less than or equal to 32 gb bytes at a time like individually structured within the network and so when you are coming to that process and this enables you to have like at least one but oftentimes many uh since especially if you're storing uh smaller files that are in the mebibytes or i don't even know what the kib the term is using binary is not as intuitive but yeah if your files are smaller obviously unable to make even more deals but this ensures that you get at least one and it's extremely useful for testing and developing around uh falcon plus and ensuring that you understand the end damn flow and are able to utilize data cap as a client next is this process of going directly to an actual like human node rate so not an automated notary where a human is doing like subjective vetting due diligence and analysis to choose to give you some of their ground effectively as a client because they believe that you are worthy of this so their measure of worthiness uh we'll dig into a little bit more in the next slide but tends to be sort of a combination of like trust that they can establish with you as a client and like understand that who you are what you bring to the table but also the data that you're on boarding and why it's useful and valuable and enables file coin to be a more productive network and achieve its mission to be like the data store for humanity so individual notaries exist like all over the world we currently have like 23 uh active notaries distributed in most regions uh recently in the last military election cycle we also had energy elected from oceania so we're adding more continents as we go along um but no trees will typically ground like between zero and 50 w heavy bytes of data cap um to an individual client so this is a really good uh way to go if you're working on like building like an actual production use case where like just like the test like gb magnitude is not enough but you actually want to onboard either like one or multiple data sets or you're working to build a solution where at least for your first round for production like having 50 uh tb bytes today data on board onto the network that's cover your needs then there's this third sort of tier which is if you're bringing on a really large data set and so this is we've seen this be really popular with a lot of like archival use cases um so like projects that are working on like multi pebby byte scale like data onboarding onto the network have come through this uh and so this path instead of like applying to an individual notary you're applying to groups of node trees effectively and so those groups and notaries become collectively liable uh as fiduciaries of the network to ensure that you as a client coming with the scale and demand to the network are worthy of receiving data cap at this magnitude um and so the application process so that looks a little bit different and i'll talk to those in a second but the intent is that it's a fully open and transparent process uh where you do you know some requisite amount of kyc address questions that are coming in from the community or from those groups of notaries and receive like a massive amount of data cap uh associated with your address that gets allocated to you over time um and so that process is a little different in that for the for the first one you're going to a website and you know signing in with github giving an address and getting data cap for the second one uh you go to the five point plus registry and we can share links about this but uh you effectively it's a plus startfill.org you you sign into that and you just identify a notary that typically is either in your region on your relevant field of work um and you're able to identify somebody that you can work with can understand your use case understand your business needs and can give you the data cap that you require and then there's this third tier which is effectively not through such a easy or handheld process of a website but rather through like a github issue so that it is open and transparent and openly discussed and we also have community governance calls that we'll be talking about at the end of our presentation because we'd love to see you there but one of the topics of conversation at those calls is these large data set notary applications that are open at the moment um and ensuring that clients that are interested in being unblocked to store pepe by scale data on the network do receive the support and sort of the friction free experience to the extent that we can on the network and so this is more the collective responsibility large-scale archival use cases on on falcon and unblocking them from moving forward i'll talk a little bit about this yeah yeah so deep sort of touched on some of this um we'll just speak you know briefly about like what it looks like to get verified again after you do sort of that first auto verification process as kind of a sample test run where you to go you know directly to a notary what they're going to do that we have some community standards that we sort of all share and aligned on but each notary can have their own individual process so there is not necessarily one hard and fast kind of application or set of questions that everyone would need to answer to work with that middle group of going directly to a notary but in general that kind of kyc you know know your client due diligence it's essentially just going to be the notary asking a little bit more about you the client to say you know are you an individual or an organization can you share your website or your social media handles so that we you know can fed a little bit that you exist who are you and then tell us a little bit about your use case and the data type so the data type could be you know someone who's storing primarily documentation and the use case is it's a technical uh archival data set of sort of you know written documentation or it might be a data type that is video archival video files from some you know journalistic endeavor that they collected and then there's conversations around whether or not this data is public or private um and then the questions become you know what is your anticipated sort of storage behavior and there's some kind of guidelines that we encourage people to use around like how much redundancy do we encourage people to to bake into their system and then what kind of geographic distribution so our goal and intent through these programs is to kind of both help clients make you know good archival data decisions using some some industry best practices but to also have you know diversified uh network strength and so helping with geographic um and storage provider diversity and the niche questions around like you know deal and data transparency so we want to have these you know deals in existing transparently on the network and sort of getting the clients um you know to share and understand like that current expectation and so that's the path in that in that middle sector where you may be getting in the teddy by range of data cap working directly with a notary in your region and then if uh you know you wanted to learn more about the file coin plus program or you know what you could do to get involved the first great place is just following you know this link to these docs these are on the five coin docs and it's a set of steps that will walk you through everything from you know standing up a lotus light node and creating your first address you know linked to that lotus light node and then going through the process of using that auto notary um to verify and get your first little sample set of 32 gigabytes of data cap to then experiment and play with you could work directly with a notary if you want to onboard larger data sets maybe you know again as something that you wanted to test or a service that you were building out or developing um and you can find more about that in our kind of github repo right now as well as in that plus tophill.org um link that we sent in the chat you can find you know both of these links we also would love to invite you uh all to get involved in our community governance you can join a call um those are happening every other week and we you know discuss some of the topics um the directions that that the program is going how can we you know where the friction points how do we unblock people because the overall goal of file point plus is to help sort of grease the wheels on deal ceiling and how do we get more data onto the network um in a way that is working for all of those different entities and so in those governance calls we want to try and understand you know where some of those friction points are and then see what solutions we could implement we also invite you all to apply and become notaries and become those stewards of the network directly working with other clients and so you may be interested uh you know in working with a larger array of clients that are creating that data um and so you could help connect them to that data cap to get those verified deals we also always need additional tooling we have lots of interesting ideas and processes for things the filecoin foundation has grants available at a range of sizes for people to help build tools that are going to grow and improve the overall filecoin network some examples are things like reporting and investigation tools uh on you know various like deal making and behavior practices uh being able to investigate where data cap is in that different funnel and maybe again helping automate some of that process of how we would unblock by finding the stickiest point we also want to improve the notary due diligence process what are some tools that we can help build in conjunction with our notaries and have a robust toolset that helps our notaries do that kyc process in kind of a fair and transparent and equitable way again in an international scale so to all of that you could work directly with the filecoin foundation contact us um we're happy to help talk to you about our different deaf grant opportunities uh and we are standing up kind of different bounty boards where we'll you know figure out some of these primed ideas seed ideas but we'd just love to hear from the community about what ideas they may have we super appreciate your time and listen to us about fivecoin plus and verifying and onboarding useful data to the filecoin network i'd love to open it up to any questions and discussions that the group might have oh gail indeed that was a incredible introduction to flocklandplus we had a couple questions but you already answered all of them in the last slide because she went into every single subsection of how this appeals to different parties uh maybe i'll just kind of rephrase some of the questions that we can go maybe deeper into it but i think maybe just understanding how you're prioritizing which group to kind of get involved more you obviously talked about the devtools side the the notary side the sealer side so is there like a particular group that is more important right now and how are you thinking about bringing people in sure yeah um yeah my reaction to that is basically no i think that all of these stakeholders are really really important and individually um play a role that supports like supports each other effectively like it's very hard to just have extremely efficient notaries and then not have clients that want to leverage those notaries to use the network and if you have a lot of clients and you don't have the supply side of the marketplace to storage providers that are interested in taking those deals then it's also not particularly useful i think one thing that the network has going for it right now is a very strong set of storage providers um that are willing and able to serve the needs of clients on the network and so we sort of view falco and buses and they right now as an enabling function for those clients to say hey like how do i prove that i'm like a productive member of this ecosystem and then how do i convince a storage provider to effectively pick me or work with me to ensure that i get like high quality storage over a period of time and so effectively uh you know we'd love to engage people that are your notaries that want to be notaries or people that are clients and want to be clients or are also just on like this the supply side of the marketplace the storage providers uh but also in general like the falcon press program is relatively young like we think about things on the five ten year minimum like horizon uh with these things and as a network falcon's only been around for a year falcon bus was instituted as a fip at that stage as well and so i think we've got a lot of learning to do and a lot of improvement in our processes and so even the bare minimum hey like show up to our calls check out the github repo like talk to us give us your feedback engage on slack github etc it's still useful like minutes of time from somebody who has a helpful perspective at this stage uh still adds a lot of value and so i i would almost say like reduce what you think the standard is for you to like participate and engage in the system and be productive and help this sort of flywheel effect of ensuring that like the network is productive and come engage in whatever the natural fit is because i think we'd love to have you so there's also an advantage as we have lots of things that can be worked on in parallel and so you know someone coming to to this this particular program with ideas or tooling you know for example that they wanted to help build are not in any way going to slow down or be at the cost of us you know engaging with them and helping get that project going while also prioritizing you know onboarding more of those large data sets or you know working to unblock the notary due diligence process and so one of the things that's just really exciting is as you know as deep said if somebody comes in and they have a new perspective or a new idea and a little bit of bandwidth um that can really uh quickly like rapidly um turn into a lot of an exciting opportunity potential because we can then maybe connect them with other community members that are thinking the same way or that are kind of pulling in that same direction and so the nice thing about a very broad open source community governance model is you know we don't have as many kind of individual hierarchical blockers where you know changes or project programs need to really kind of fit into some kind of road map or particular process scale um and so it allows us to really work on lots of exciting things in parallel well uh nothing this is really well said and i think i'll summarize this by saying if anybody's interested in getting involved showing up is the first step and uh it's really enough that uh you can figure out how you can best participate in that ecosystem so um with that i want to thank both of you for talking about falcon plus and for that amazing talk and then we'll wrap the the day with a quick message to all of our hackers that submissions are due this sunday and uh can't wait to see what everybody builds so happy hacking everybody and uh if you are stuck or if you have any last minute things that you need help on uh be sure to ping the mentor's channel on discord and want to make sure that you're ready for this sunday so uh thanks for tuning in thanks for watching all the summits and engaging with us on the chat