FVM & Grants — Bringing Filecoin and Ethereum Even Closer Together Pooja Shah

all right hi everyone uh great to be here today and to see some of you again from an earlier event um but yes my name is puja and i'm talking about a couple of the exciting things that we're announcing today um that are we're really excited about for 2022 to bring the file coin and ethereum ecosystems even closer together so uh before i jump into what's planned for 2022 i'm gonna do a really quick recap of what happened in 2021 so for those of you who may not know uh filecoin mainnet launched in october 2020 so it's been a little bit less than a year and a half and it's been really amazing to see honestly just the cambrian explosion of activity in the ecosystem that's just unfolded over the last year and a half so there's definitely you know just thousands of organizations now and individuals and entities that are participating in various parts of the file queen ecosystem we have a number of folks who are building products and developer tooling and services a number of companies in the file coin and ipfs ecosystems that we have invested in um and also given grants to a number of folks within ipvs and the p2p ecosystems that have now found a way to incorporate filecoin into what they're doing which has been really awesome to see and then of course thousands of storage providers that have been providing storage services to users on the network by the numbers this today looks like 18 exabytes of storage capacity that are on the filepoint network and available for users to store data with it's a truly truly massive amount of storage and that is being provided by almost 4000 storage providers distributed all over the world so a pretty massive storage network um just on on that component on its own um but then we also have almost you know 700 a little bit more than 750 organizations that are using filecoin as their primary storage layer for a number of different use cases these are a bunch of web3 projects but also groups like archives and museums and other organizations that are more like web 2 that have found file queen's massive storage capacity very useful for what the data sets that they're trying to store and today that's almost 41 petabytes of data that have been stored on the network and then in addition in the last year we launched a number of developer on-ramps onto ipfs and filecoin which have collectively brought almost 30 000 new developers into the ecosystem as well so a huge amount of growth and we really have been leaning into this concept in the last year that we started to call the builders funnel which was you know starting by providing developers with educational resources to understand about the stack then working with them at hackathons and to sort of teach them hands-on how to actually use the stack supporting hackathon developers with uh grants to take their projects to the next level and then ultimately pairing some of these projects with accelerators and incubators and ultimately uh venture investment so that they could actually if they so chose launch these hackathon projects as um actual startups which we now have i think this uh top right slide is a little bit old there's about a hundred projects or so that have gone through that whole pipeline which has been really awesome to see just the growth of actual companies within the biocoin ecosystem as well and then i mentioned a number of our developer on-ramps so nft.storage was a big one that we launched last year which is being used by openc and a number of other groups to store their data on decentralized storage there's also web3.storage which is a more general developer on-ramp for ipfs and filecoin fleek is a product that's been around for a while but it's a very easy way to host your website on ipfs and there's a tool called powergate which is built by the textile team which is also like a nicer interface for filecoin uh and then also infura launched a file open api and so on there are a couple other products like this which are really intending to just make it very easy to interact with ipfs and filecoin so i think one of the big things that we really focused on in 2021 was just making sure that we could confidently say filecoin was a reliable storage and retrieval layer for humanity's most valuable data and that's been our core focus um and i think you know a lot of the work that we've done over the last year has has made that a reality and we've also really invested heavily in building our ecosystem of of developers and builders but as we look to 2022 there are a couple of really exciting things that we um you know are looking into tapping into like you know now there's all of this storage capacity there's all this data there all these people in our in in the ecosystem and many more who haven't yet entered the falcon ecosystem um how do we make this just like an incredible set of solutions for them and provide them the support that they actually need in order to take their projects to the next level so that's what i wanted to spend most of the time today talking about filecoin virtual machine or fpm and our work that we're doing on public goods funding and grants okay so talking about the falcon virtual machine so um it's worth saying that you know i think most folks if you're familiar with filecoin you know it as a storage network but really storage is just the start and that's always kind of been the case we were always planning on launching a robust storage network and then one day being able to launch user generated smart contracts on on filecoin and so that day is finally here it's not exactly here but it will be here um in a few months and um we're really excited basically to unleash this ability for users to generate smart contracts on that they can use to interact with the data that they've stored on the filecoin network and there are a number of really exciting use cases that you know obviously the the power to create smart contracts is is infinite there's so much you can do with it but especially when it comes to data and the world that we know really well there are a number of really interesting use cases um that we're excited to see fvm unlock and i'll talk a little bit more about some of these in a few slides um but so what is fvm um so and actually one of our tech leads of the fem project gave a really great talk a few months ago to describe a little bit more of the architecture so if you're interested in that i would definitely recommend watching that talk it was from our conference called file coinorbit but just at a high level fem is going to be wasm based how did we decide to make this choice we looked at a number of different options um and ultimately decided that wasm gave us the flexibility we needed in terms of being able to rebuild file coins built-in system actors on top of wasm but then also enabling one thing that we knew was very very important from the beginning was being able to offer evm compatibility and so that's um the way that we're planning on doing this is effectively uh writing these interpreters and shims that will take evm code and compile it down to wasm and in that way we're hoping that you know folks who are really familiar with solidity and evm-based smart contract development can deploy their smart contracts directly onto the filecoin blockchain um so yeah so you know obviously this is this is just was kind of a non-brainer that that no-brainer that this was like extremely important to have evm compatibility um obviously the ecosystem of developer tooling and ides and so on around evm and solidity have really matured over the last few years and so um this is something that's like very important and but you know obviously as as we have been thinking about how do we actually do this translation and build these shims and interpretive layers and so on there are a number of challenges that have come up so for example how do we translate evm's memory uh model to ipld which is filecoin's native native data model um how do we think about gas accounting and uh how do we think about like call backs and things like this and so if you're interested in helping to think through these problems and how to actually get these um these different runtimes to talk to each other very nicely we would love to to talk to you and um there's actually the i'll i guess it's in the next slide but um you can learn more about the fdm project at fem.filecoin.io and that also gives us gives you all the information about our repos and where you can get in touch with the team to participate in this project um but to quickly touch on some of the use cases that we're super excited about so um you know there are so many different different use cases one of the ones that i think is like especially pertinent now that we've seen this massive growth in the nft ecosystem over the last year is this idea of access controls on nfts so one thing that we think will be very interesting to see with fvm is the ability to mint an nft directly at this in the same layer where the data for the raw asset is being stored and then to also have certain types of access controls so that say it's you know some very high-end nft artwork or or some type of asset and you only want as a creator or collector that data to be accessible to certain addresses that's something that fem would allow you to enable to have kind of this access control layer on the data directly um there are other ideas too like we really like this idea of dataverse or datadows as we call it um which is kind of like tokenizing data sets and enabling a community of people that really care about a particular data set to have ownership over over it and to be able to make some governance decisions about what does the long-term preservation and stewardship of this particular data set look like um and so that's that's something else that we think is going to be very interesting and there are lots of like you know gigantic scientific communities that really care about how their data is stewarded longer term and so i'm really excited to see that use case unlocked in addition the ability to have sort of automatic replication of data so being able to enable this use case where you can just kind of send your data to the filecoin network and say well i want to be stored 10 times and i want to be stored in somewhere in europe and maybe somewhere in the u.

s not in this part of the world and just being able to select certain parameters and then kind of have the network take care of all of the actual replication and proper ongoing storage of the data for you um and so on there are just like so many different use cases i guess another one too that we've heard a lot from the nft community is being able to um have permanent you know so-called permanent storage of data in a non-custodial fashion so just being able to again throw your data over the fence and then just have it continue storing um forever theoretically unless you want to stop storing it for whatever reason so these are just some of the use cases that we have identified just you know knowing a little bit about the use cases that are currently on filecoin but obviously there are boundless opportunities for innovation there's so much that can possibly be done and we definitely want to learn more from all the creative folks in this room what what you think would be really cool to build on filecoin and fem um so as i mentioned fem.filecoin.io is the website um and we actually also have a a grants and sort of like early builders program the application for that is i think the deadline is in a week and a half or so so if you're interested in really getting involved in this ecosystem i'd definitely recommend taking a look at the website and seeing if you would like to participate in the early builders program on fem okay so the next uh really exciting thing that i wanted to talk about was um publix our work in public goods funding and grants um which is an area that we've started to you know it's an area we've always been very passionate about everything that protocol labs as a company builds for the most part is is open sourced um but and you know we funded a number of groups that have thought about what's like the long-term uh maintenance incentivation incentivization um mechanisms that people can leverage for open source work but really very seriously we started thinking about this about six months ago and i think there have been also a number of other groups in the space that have been doing some very exciting thinking around public goods funding and so really what we mean when we talk about this is how do we sustainably fund projects that create significant value in an ecosystem but may not be capturing enough of that value to be self-sustaining on their own and so our goal with the efforts that we've been engaging in is to identify and fund valuable public goods that we think need to be sustained and also do a bunch of work thinking about what are the really interesting mechanisms that can be used to sustainably fund public goods and then also to bring together a bunch of the groups in the space that have been doing some really interesting thinking here so some of the mechanisms which i'm not going to talk about in too much detail here but uh some of the mechanisms that we've been kind of experimenting with and implementing are these kind of three categories that i've mentioned so uh on the slide so the first is this idea that we're calling blue funds uh and it's kind of like you could think of a venture capital fund but really just focused on funding public goods um but the structure is very similar you know it's a thesis-based capital pool um where you know people can apply to with a thesis that they think um is going to be really important and impactful for an ecosystem get funding from protocol labs and and related entities and then just go out and allocate that capital into the ecosystem and there's like sort of an evaluation impact evaluation process at the end to see whether or not that capital was allocated in a useful way or not so um this idea of sort of like delegated capital pools is one thing we've been experimenting with um then impact evaluators which are exactly kind of what the name sounds like which are just mechanisms to assess the impact of different projects within an ecosystem and sort of fund them on the basis of that assessment of impact and there's sort of two main categories of impact evaluators that we think about one is more subjective so if you think of like the quadratic funding style of impact assessment uh that's kind of one category and another is more quantitative and we call these like kpi based impact evaluators where we're essentially looking to see the impact of a number of different groups around some very like clearly measurable kpi in the file coin case one example could be um looking at the proportional contributions of different groups that are collectively working to bring data to the file point network as one example and then the last is looking at what are scalable ways of utilizing grants and bounties and other mechanisms in order to implement bigger roadmaps you know like as uh as the founders of ipfs and falcon and all these other projects we want these to be owned by the community but we also have some ideas about what's really valuable in these ecosystems and so how can we like really scalably execute on those roadmaps but in a more sort of open and decentralized way and not having to build all of that within the protocol labs company itself so um some of these ideas we uh have explored in this series of conferences that we run which are called funding the commons the first one we had last year in november and it was like a very successful event so we're just we decided to do another one which is happening in a couple of weeks some of the topics that um we explored at the last one included just sort of like a survey of novel public goods funding mechanisms from uh from vitalik hearing from owaki um from get coin about you know their quadratic funding work and how and what are some of the learnings from that also learning about the optimisms retro pgf experiment um and also some very interesting but still more theoretical ideas such as s-process funding impact certificates and impact markets and other sort of more direct theoretical mechanisms to assess impact relative to other projects in an ecosystem so these are all available of course online if you're interested in learning more about this stuff and i think one of the really interesting questions that has come out of this area of thinking about public that's funding i sort of alluded to before but it really is this question of how do we when we think about providing direction within a decentralized ecosystem but also retaining sort of like the open like and you know open-endedness and ownership um that people within a decentralized ecosystem actually feel over it um how do we actually like make the useful things we think need to happen happen but also preserve and on a you know fast time frame but also preserve that sort of like decentralized ownership component of a decentralized ecosystem um which is kind of a tricky set of things to uh balance like if you think about the company the organizations that are the most successful at coordinating work really efficiently they're companies like centralized organizations that have very top-down planning processes um but obviously they you know they have some drawbacks um which we all in this room uh don't want to build a lot of companies and organizations in that way uh but when we think about decentralized ecosystems there is sometimes this like difficulty of actually coordinating work um and especially directing those efforts into a um a particular direction that the ecosystem overall thinks is really useful so one of the one of the ideas and again this is still kind of theoretical um but is this idea of a networked okr um so if folks are familiar with okrs it's kind of a way that a lot of companies do central centralized planning but the idea of a networked okr was just kind of a more open sort of crowdsourced way of servicing from within an ecosystem what are the top priorities to execute within that ecosystem so you might think of like how might this actually happen in practice um it's a number of teams within a decentralized ecosystem so say within the ethereum community that have funding and they sit down with their teams and they you know say well these are the things that are really important um within the ethereum ecosystem that are going to actually affect our roadmap and also as you know stewards of the ethereum ecosystem these are the things that would be really important for ethereum to have overall um and associate some amount of funding with uh with those particular projects and then surface those grants effectively or bounties on what they think is most important to the broader network in this more open way so that it's a way of kind of express like crowdsourcing a lot of different funders opinions on what is the highest priority work to fund within an ecosystem um and so i think i'm almost over yeah so um we are basically you know thinking about this idea um we started to build this decentralized grants marketplace to kind of allow ecosystems to have a place to express what they think these priorities are um and we're actually i'll just get that so today this you know project is very new but today there um there are a number of projects there's about six or so grants which total um about 750 000 worth of grants um that are available specifically for projects within the final queen ecosystem and they sort of span ux ui design and 10 product development technical design and architecture like a whole a bunch of different areas and more grand sorcerer being added constantly so take a look at our website dgm.xyz if you are interested um and yeah that's it so fvm and our work in public goods funding and grants we're super excited to kind of lean into these directions in 2022 and hopefully um bring the filecoin and ethereum ecosystems even closer together thank you