Filecoin Storage Provider Overview - Jenks Guo | HackFS 2023

foreign [Music] here from filecoin who's going to be doing the second Workshop of the day the file coin storage provider overview I know some of you destroyed from the last one but happy to see you here and some new faces for the second one of the day and with that being said um if you have any questions they can go into the zoom chat and Jenks will be more than happy to answer those and um yeah thanks feel free to take the mic from here thank you Anna hi everyone hello again uh for those who haven't had enough of me I'm here to talk about Falcon storage providing um so I'm I'm a developer Advocate from Fall claim Foundation I uh I wear many hats within falcoin ecosystem so the working group between Pro collabs and falcoin Foundation um one of the things that I do because I can speak Mandarin is I interact with a lot of uh storage providers that are primarily based in Asia and they represent a lot of Sarge power in the network so over time I have accumulated quite a bit of knowledge on start providing business but the disclaimer is I have not I have never done um started providing in filecoin before um because it kind of requires quite a bit of investment up front um if you're trying to run a profitable business it requires a large Capital up front a lot of staking and also so very expertise a lot of expertise in in running storage in it business in general so if you um if you're a small time trying to do it for hobby you can do it and it's fun I think for for for people that are interested in in general Linux and maintaining server infrastructure but um it is it is time consuming so for these reasons I I've been doing my main job and not started providing so I'm gonna go over start providing in high level um and I want this um presentation or Workshop to be more interactive so feel free to ask me if you have any questions about Falcon storage providing I'll go along and um very quickly um and I'll leave Pro for probably 10 to 15 minutes for answering questions so first first thing first the missions the missions of protocol labs and Falcon Foundation are slightly different but working towards the same uh same goal in in uh in some area so you can see uh protocol Labs offer really large wind diagram uh a large circle on the Wind diagram Falcon foundation overlaps with it but a much smaller diagram Circle there um so protocol apps is an open source r d lab building protocols tools and services to improve the internet now internet is a is a huge thing the current Internet had about maybe um many decades to perfect itself but to build the next generation of Internet you need quite a bit of innovation in this space some of those things are critical development which uh protocol Labs Engineers are working on it they're also working on random number generators best in business Durant they're also working on things like ZK um General programming language lurk and all things get funded by protocol labs and gets resource by protocol apps to happen and ipfs is one of their most famous Creations so ipfs is a peer-to-peer protocol that makes web upgradable resilient and more open think of it as a peer-to-peer version of http um just protocol itself doesn't make any money or doesn't have a business model behind it and so that's why file coin network was created Falcon network was created to encourage people contributing hard Hardware resources to provide data center services it is a decentralized storage Network to store Humanity most important information think of it as a Airbnb for a data storage so if you mentioned Airbnb there is a business model behind it so it could be profitable for a lot of people to join but if you think HTTP no one makes money off it it's just the standard Falcon Foundation is not the owner of falcoin network it doesn't own everything um of the project the project is owned by the community but filecoin Foundation is a steward of the falcoin community acting as the leader um of the of the community to help people to to work towards that goal the goal is to power Humanity's most important information and then give them back to the hands of everyone so this ties into how webstery breaks down ownership and give individuals ownership of their data and and being able to combat um you know the rise of the power and misuse of centralized centralized technology such as big cloud platforms and then big platform companies social media companies Etc um so there are just too many things that protocol apps is building but in general they're trying to make Computing better um for for Humanity um lip P2P is my favorite one of my favorite projects is mentioned in the middle uh along with you know ipf has falcoin they're cool but lip P2P is able to uh allow computers to talk to each other without using a centralized server if you think about communicating through space like a spaceship to spaceship and also while they're traveling and also my communication to Mars or other planets um you really can't run this centralized client server model to have servers sitting in on Earth in U.S maybe and then have all the information sort of transferred to to Mars it has to be an offline system and then the two planets sync occasionally only when it when it is needed so the PDP is able to to help you build applications that does that it could be with the P2P you can build ipfs but you can also build a decentralized chat software you can build a decentralized maybe a phone call application or decentralized um anything uh with it so yeah there are many demos that you can use and it's pretty cool to build a build a PDP project for hackathon so the the missions to together the the working group ecosystem working group wants to encourage more people to adopt those technology so for a protocol Labs projects we want more developers using that for Falcon we want more Enterprises to use it more storage providers to join the business and more startup successfully using this uh these Technologies to bring value to their project but also secure funding and then so they can have a maybe a a business proven business model um in some day um so right now we have 10 000 more developers across different projects of ours they're contributing or helping with uh with testing our users of of these tools and we have 3600 starting providers so data centers around the world to provide a backbone for the new new internet um and we also have 500 startups in our ecosystem that are in various stages of funding so some could be receiving our grandson could be you know hackathon price um some could be in serious uh seed run or series a 2d Series in in being evaluated by really famous VC using the word and and getting getting to the next step of their companies so there are about 500 of them our goal as the ecosystem working group is to be the best in uh in web 3 and how we measure that one of the things that we measure is uh our startups in our ecosystem getting funding at the end so I'm helping um in some aspect of of achieving that goal on my daily roles too so fall coins falcoin's economic design was mentioned in my last um presentation I won't repeat too many of those things but one thing that I want to mention is that the fire coin economic design is had some game series consideration so one other thing that um that is really unique is um what is called a baseline maintain um what that means is everyone's reward is tied to the network uh total Network cache rate or power we call them storage power um so if the total Network starts power so that's adding off everyone's hard drive together if there are more then everyone gets more reward if there are less then everyone gets uh gets less reward so everyone is incentivized to actually increase their Hardware um infrastructure over time the more you increase and if everyone does the same everyone will get the reward and then the rest rest of the main thing follows the exponential decay reward because we want to stop a simple minting in the future um also this contributes to scarcity deflates the economy and then we want to encourage people to use do other things so for example actually buying more Hardware to provide storage and build applications on top of that to offer things like web web3 hard drives Cloud drives um to consumers or provide Enterprise I.T services to to businesses so um the so one of the things I want to mention is there's a heavy collateral required for joining a storage providing business which is one of the reasons why I'm not doing storage provider business because I don't have the upfront capital for it there is also slashing for it so it is actually costly to not manage your node professionally if your sectors goes back so when hard drive goes down you're literally getting punished for for that by the network your coins will get burned and the collateral that you put in will be uh will be will be made inaccessible um so so for for this reason most of the like a scalable storage provider businesses actually has staff to manage the cluster of computers not 24 7 but you gotta at least attend to it at some time of the day um so so it is a pretty pretty serious business that people are running um Falcon is a token allocation is designed in our Falcon economy paper but also in a falcon primer uh and this was also on the Saft agreement on clean list as well so of the initial investors knows about this the whole world knows about how file client allocation is done you can see that Falcon Foundation receives about five percent of total Falcon that will be ever created uh protocol labs and teams will create about 1.15 and the initial initial investors will receive 10 of the coin allocation and then the majority of them actually are allocated to service providing or storage providing and so storage providers are actually the biggest token holders of our economy because most of the rewards are given to them um as uh as the encouragement of contributing their Hardware resources and their time um this storage is not the only Market that filecoin Network intends to create and there is also a very big appetite in retrieving content very quickly very reliably and cheaply from um from anywhere in the world um so it's called a retrieval Market or a CDM Market um it is a 20 billion dollar market According to some Market researchers um and we want to use the mining Reserve allocation to uh to encourage uh build up of retrieval nodes or CDN nodes around the world in the decentralized fashion and we want to do compute over data when data is stored on filecoin it's very the customers will gravitate towards using Falcon machines to compute and and perform some duties on these data if you would like to read more about this a really good website to go to is Falcon tldr they have abstract a lot of um um another thinking behind a very lengthy uh YouTube videos uh research papers white papers and blogs into very easy to understand articles and blogs and Twitter Subs that you want to read so if you're interested a little bit more on Falcon's economy and our plans for the future take a look at Falcon tldr I really like the team behind it behind this site falcoin is going through a phased economy at first we encourage a mess of hardware and in stage two we want to introduce more services so into the network so actual clients will start to use and try uh the the tools and scalability and efficiencies to improve and then the last stage is uh the brand and products so there should be less people joining because of the block rewards there should be more people joining because this is a valid business model behind it to provide storage you know retrieval or compute services on the network um and there will be a lot of people paying for the there should be a lot of people paying for those Services as well so what that means to storage providers are at the first stage you could just get enough reward by bringing your hard drives online it could be spinning with no data on it or just zeroing the ones in the uh not actual data but over time the reward for just bringing contributing hard Hardware will reduce and then we have other programs to encourage people to uh to store actual data and do deals with customers actual data clients so we call uh so falcoin plus is a program that encourages that and we have a system to encourage to find clients and and also encourage start providers to take those client deals once they have taken those deals and we have verified the data is actually used for data from some company or from open data source and then we store them the storage provider will get a different uh kind of a block reward ratio from the network it's called data caps or verified deals and this is our way of encouraging people to go into different phases of the economy so in the in the future we'll have probably different programs for other things I'll talk about some of them a little bit later those data programs so fall coins start providing requires understanding of following economy it requires quite extensive I.T business skills I.

T skills uh and it we're attracting people who wants to build infrastructure so the the faint-hearted um you know hobbyist you can run it you can do it but really the the whole system is designed for people who are committed to the to the business and build a real infrastructure so uh they also need to purchase a lot of fuel as flateral so there is a formula to calculate collaterals down there um but it equates to if you want a hundred terabyte um or tip it by um it requires about the 640 field for for each uh it depends on your storage size essentially so first first step in uh becoming a starter provider is to create a minor equipment and then you'll need to purchase acquires on token so purchase one exchange or um borrow from some lender and then start to commit your capacity to it you need to reach a certain minimum minor size to be able to participate and receive rewards so this is what I call a community capacity mining or the first phase of the economy um and then after a while um you will be taking deals from the network um and you can find your own clients as well um and then start to take deals you get paid not only for providing a service to the client um but also you get Block rewards from the from the Block uh from from Falcon protocol for providing a good service so by the way the one thing to understand is actually client deals the client's payment for actual uh service that's on top of the block rewards that we give you so um actually it's quite common for people to write zero fill for the start price uh to the to the storage provider so naturally our chain is not incorp it's not designed to actually capture uh the real value of um uh of a storage deals it's a bit hard to analyze that the quite often the storage price like a business who wants to store maybe 100 terabyte off Drive they will make direct deals uh with their filecoin storage provider and pay them either through fill or through other channels but then they will all publish their deals on blockchain because the clients requires the security of Falcon blockchain to ensure that their files that the search provider is um is doing the right thing and keeping the files secure and they also require the yeah so once it's on Falcon chain and there's heavy collateral on the start provider they wouldn't do those things um so over time the starting providers are expect are expected to operate capacity and participate certain data programs and when things have gone bad when you have lots of data storage providers are encouraged to recover these datas and there are some recovery there's some data programs that are related to data recovery we're really not good at storing data for a long long time a lot of web pages goes to Affordable just after like one or two years so recovery data is also a very important step in in data persistency Falcon block rewards are given to the starter providers if they're doing the useful work uh useful work includes ceiling which is a fall coin term of formatting partitions or storing you know files into what we call sectors which is the 32 gigabyte or 62 gigabyte it is artificial created units of uh storage within the hard drive uh to so for for us to calculate everything uh all the block rewards and stuff is calculated based on the sectors um and then what sector could contain part of the file or many files in one sector um and uh storage writer also gets paid by participating in consensus maintaining um you know participate the storage uh sorry the blockchain uh production election and then producing the next block um the the miners receive block rewards in in direct proportion to their quality adjusted power so what that means is if you have um if you have a better quality uh sector you'll you're expected to get more rewards over time I like this traditional proof of um proof of work blockchain that requires miners to perform computationally intensive uh or otherwise useless tasks to win block rewards file clayminer can can learn block reward by proving that they are providing reliable and useful storage to network clients anyone can contribute start resources to the to the Falcon Network and start earning rewards right away and then the message the name of the message that is called um that is what storage providers use to get rewards is called winning post a shuffle winning proof of space-time this is a cryptographic challenge that start provider will need to contribute to the uh well when you just sent it to to be able to get there get the small chunk of reward um uh for for them um if you would like to find out more there's this site called Phil fox.info uh Explorer um you can take a look at who is the biggest Miner right now and then who's getting most of the rewards in the network the storage deal uh usually takes about one to two days to complete um sometimes it happens faster some depending on how fast the storage provider reacts and then the the data stuff goes through a journey right so if it is a really large data it must be sitting somewhere in in a home or office or data center usually for verify data we give data caps of free storage for our clients to who wants to store we want to encourage verify data we want to encourage start provider to also build up the resources they need to to to prepare for the incoming search clients in the future so we give data caps to to them to business who wants to try Falcon storage and this this data will be extracted encrypted and chunked aggregated into desired sector size and then the transformation begins so these data will be transformed into formats ipfs and filecoin likes um the deal gets made between storage provider starter clients and then the data transfer begins data transfer can happen online or offline but happening online is very painful because the network connection bandwidth is still very slow across countries um especially and unless you have dedicated line you can't really you can't really transfer large amount of data very quickly so it's quite common for storage providers to actually receive a disk that's that's portable so something like what you see on the right hand corner top right hand corner of my presentation so CK has some solutions for moving a huge amount of data around and it gets sent via post or a sneakernet so the data deal gets managed and then the clients can keep track of all of the files and cids and then the storage provider will need to ensure that these are stored if they're destroyed then they need to recover this um in in a timely manner to avoid being slashed where are these storage providers these start fires are largely in Asia so we have a interactive map that someone has built um that will give you a better idea of where these starter providers are so this is this is a chart that I want to show you this is made by gympac I think this might take a while to load but I'll I'll go back to the presentation slide so this this is pulling data live from Falcon Network and it's going to display a interactive zoomable Sunburst chart so as the playlist but we can see that China mainly represents most of the quality adjusted power Hong Kong and Singapore um we had used to have about a 90 uh storage power came from China but since the policy changed it had encouraged the further decentralization of our Network so a lot of the Mainland Chinese start provider either migrated to Hong Kong Singapore uh or uh or they just uh exited um and then new people from from other regions have joined there is a large presence from North America and then some other countries as well Australia has has a share there I'm glad to see that so let me go back to this zoomable Charles so this is the zoombo chart that we can see it's a little big and uh we can see that we can draw a little bit deeper into North America and see um so are the combined in the west uh there's quite a bit in the west one exabyte and then buy and then in the South a little bit yeah maybe we can go a little bit further all right look at that you can go to Virginia Kentucky Texas uh so yeah have a look at this uh if you're interested in their geological reason geological positions um yeah take a look at that I also want to show you the Phil Fox Explorer so this is a block this is one of the many uh block explorers out there and this gives you the data live data of um you know um how many miners are there how many what kind of block rewards you should be expecting from the network this might be an average um and then uh What uh in general what what people are doing uh so data clients I mentioned a little bit and we have over 1 500 unique clients and more than this number is outdated I think we have more than one exabyte of data onboarded now if you're interested in checking that go to Falcon Explorer and find out all the clients that are using filecoin so uh providing storage is a hard business to get in um but uh we're trying to make it very easy so there are different programs that are encouraging people to to learn about storage providing led by industry experts these are people who have worked in IT industry or the business of running data centers for more than a decade um so this part is one of the upcoming Asia program that is going to take place in Hong Kong um in late June now so stay tuned for that so if you're located near Asia feel free to join this D Spot program and learn all all the things about start providing iSpa Enterprise Starfighter accelerator is run by picnic one North American Store provider in partnership with political apps and Seagate AMD manufacturers of the hard drives they are putting up a really big take a camp for onboarding start providers in Vegas in October so stay tuned for that they have been running that for quite a few cohorts and for everyone else if you are not able to make to these real life events you can feel free to go to sp.falcoin.io and learn everything about uh started providing there it acts as a all-in-one starting place for all SPS now for um for dspa and espa we have I think for iSpa we have published quite a few uh presentation recordings online so you can watch those ones to find out exactly what they go through well we provide so apart from presentations we also provide there are people that can help you to consult on your business so from everything um how to start how to operate a Lotus node to how to do accounting of your storage providing to make sure you're profitable these things are all uh or getting uh you're you're gonna get a lot of help from from all these programs so far coins tools um if you want to run a sword fighting business you need to deal with one of the three storage provider softwares so a Lotus node is our no software it's built by protocol X and most majority of the network operators uses Lotus and then Venus is the one that's built by Community it's powered by ipfs force and it's a implementation of filecoin node we're also commissioning uh chainsafe to build a complete rust based Falcon node software it's called Forest still new in development but it is catching up and and uh and the experience of running it is really good so I encourage you to take a look at all these notes offers so I think we do have general price for this hackathon so if you build something to these node softwares that is also eligible but for day-to-day operations most of the storage providers will be running Lotus plus a software called boost which is uh is a better monitoring and uh um and tool for interacting with Falcon market so it really reduces operational efforts for running storage providing uh there are many many blocker block explorers in our ecosystem these are just four of them I think there are more uh so if you go to uh Phil Fox we can we can see a lot of information and field folks also have explorers for uh test Nets so if we want to go to test that and see some of the things and then check some of the transactions you can go there to check um and there are they're they're building more systems building more services like a falcoin naming services and all that in there so that's pretty good another tool really useful tool is Falcon dashboard so if you just want to have a really high level or insights of Falcon economy you can go to a starboard falcoin Market dashboard which gives you a insight into uh the the status of awkward Market Starboy also has a fvm dashboard so Falcon Virtual Machine to see how much money gets deposited into the smart contract and then do a little bit deeper dig into the smart contracts themselves if you need to investigate also falcoin plus so the program that is encouraging a useful data onboarding they also have a dashboard on who's storing the largest data set and how much how much data cap they're getting and who stores who stores them um and then the Falcon green uh project also has an energy dashboard which exposes a extrapolated energy consumption of all file coin um storage providers out there they are building some Frameworks and tools to integrate with All Storage providers in the future to accurately predict their power consumption and see how much offset they can do and we can do on the network level to be to make this whole thing cover neutral or carbon negative so just setting off the economy uh doesn't always work so um there are some specific programs that are designed to encourage certain behaviors in the economy so I mentioned Falcon plus earlier Falcon plus is a program to improve the data quality of Falcon Network so how they run this uh is they have selected uh quite a few notaries around the world and then the data notaries will inspect the company's data whoever submits application to them to store on falkway they will inspect and verify if they're useful data um and then the client will receive data caps to store uh store the valuable data they have Falcon green is our sustainability ability project in future there might be some some kind of encouragement or incentive for providers to go green as Space Race was the first competition to bring open data set to Falcon that gave Falcon storage sort of data onboarding a first kick or kickoff and the slingshot was the one that renews that the open data that were stored in the space race and Evergreen is a continuous running program to encourage start Rider to persist those those data and moon landing sort of is the other program to encourage not only the storage side of things but also data recovery of of different different data there is also a big data Exchange Market which is a market for people to trade verify data so if you have a really valuable and large data set you can go on a big extract Big Data exchange and show your case to the whole whole world or the search provider community and some storage provider Community because they are so efficient and well run they can they're happy to purchase these uh to store these data so I mean think about that that's uh um that's kind of a negative priced storage for Quality data so really there is a lot of extent appetite in storing um verified data there there is also SP reputation dashboard that is uh that is being built some of them are already out there um so this provides a general reputation system for storage providers so you can you know who to trust more um so the whole thing is owned by the community and file coins governance is uh facilitated by Falcon Foundation it is Community Driven it is down through what is called Falcon Improvement proposals um and there are one of the reason proposal that was uh that was really popular in the community was 36 which has uh fine-tuned uh fall coins economy that didn't go through but that was a perfect Showcase of how um Falcon governance goes they were a field pool being provided and there was a governance process that's been run and everyone is transparent and about the process behind it so take a look at that if you want to participate in the governance or build tools for governance uh and lastly you can all join our public stack channel to chat to PowerPoint people and for labs people directly uh me include it so feel free to chat to me if you have questions I think we're at our time and on the next Workshop is going to start very soon yeah uh maybe you'll play another couple seconds to see if anyone has questions but I think that was a very thorough workshops though um but yeah cool um looks like nothing's popped up in the zoom chat um so we can end things here um sorry James did you have anything else that you wanted no no it was just I was just preparing my screen share because I loaded some uh yeah some tools there to show to everyone but um if there's no questions we can we can discuss this in this Square in the future yeah because Jack said I had everything everyone's available on Discord this Workshop is also recorded and on YouTube so if you ever want a reference back feel free to go to the youth Global YouTube channel um there is a brainstorming and team formation Workshop happening right now on Zoom you go to Discord to find the details for that and with that being said thanks so much thanks for taking the last couple hours out of I know you're in a different time zone um uh for hosting these workshops so um thanks so much for your time and thanks for the rest of you for joining bye foreign