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Filecoin Creator Protocol Labs Announces Layoffs Amid Crypto Winter and Economic Downturn

Filecoin Creator Protocol Labs Announces Layoffs Amid Crypto Winter and Economic DownturnProtocol Labs CEO Juan Benet published a blog post on Friday announcing that 21% of the company’s staff will be laid off. Protocol Labs is the creator of the blockchain network Filecoin. Benet emphasized in the blog post that it has been an “extremely challenging economic downturn, worldwide, and especially in the crypto industry.” Protocol […]

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60 Organizations Launch Campaign Urging US Congress to Protect Privacy

60 Organizations Launch Campaign Urging US Congress to Protect PrivacyOn Wednesday, 60 organizations involved in cryptocurrencies, open-source and free software, and human rights and privacy-preserving projects launched a new campaign calling on the 118th U.S. Congress to protect privacy. The groups, including Fight for the Future, Electric Coin Co., and the Tor Project, insist that Congress needs to deliver policies dedicated to standing up […]

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Quicknode Raises $60 Million in Series B to ‘Fuel Blockchain Adoption’ and Expand Globally

Quicknode Raises  Million in Series B to ‘Fuel Blockchain Adoption’ and Expand GloballyWeb3 infrastructure firm Quicknode raised $60 million in a Series B funding round, according to an announcement the company made on Tuesday. The capital injection brings the company’s post-valuation to $800 million, and Quicknode says the funds will be used to “further fuel blockchain adoption.” Quicknode Aims to Streamline Web2 to Web3 Movement With $60 […]

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Decentralized Web3 Protocol Golden Raises $40 Million Backed by A16z

Decentralized Web3 Protocol Golden Raises  Million Backed by A16zGolden, a startup that seeks to build a decentralized data hub, has raised $40 million dollars in a Series B funding round. The round, which was led by a16z crypto, will allow the company to keep building its concept, which revolves around combining data submission and validation with Web3-based token incentives. Golden Raises $40 Million […]

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More resilient and user-controlled than the AWS: Colin Evran’s vision for Filecoin

“Filecoin is more than just storage, one can think of it as an Airbnb for cloud services."

In the beginning of 2021, Filecoin was a relatively unknown decentralized peer-to-peer storage service with a total network capacity barely making a dent in the digital storage space. Less than two years later, the Filecoin team claimsthe blockchain has grown to eclipse 10% of the storage capacity of Amazon Web Service, the most popular vendor in the cloud infrastructure services market. This includes use of the storage — by well known blockchain firms such as OpenSea and Magic Eden — of some 239.03 terabytes of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) worth an estimated $26.6 billion as of early September.

NFT storage on Filecoin | Source: NFT.Storage

How did Filecoin become so successful;? And what motivates its developers to grow the ecosystem? Colin Evran, ecosystem lead at Protocol Labs, the creator of Filecoi says a big factor in his desire to join Filecoin was his disillusionment with how things operate in Web 2.0. 

"It's still going in the wrong direction," he said. "A handful of companies are now controlling the world's data, in my opinion, without checks and balances in many ways. And I just thought such levels of centralization over a period of many decades isn't going to be the answer for everyday users. 

"I fundamentally believe if you zoom out 40 years from now, the answer is not like AWS storing 100% of the world's data. I don't think that's good for society. I don't think that's what users really want," he said. 

Evran took some lateral steps in his path towards the blockchain sector. Having finished Ivey Business School at Western University in 2006, he first became an analyst for McKinsey before venturing into the field of private equity. Then he returned to the academic world to get his Masters from Stanford Business School and then for his Master's. 

Colin Evran of Filecoin | Source: Twitter 

After graduation, Evran founded a startup in the construction tech space called "Yard Club." Four years later the firm was sold to Caterpillar, the world's largest construction equipment designer. 

As told by Evan, the financial surety from the deal gave him the ability to focus on a project that was much more in-depth. "I really wanted to work on a piece of technology that could conceivably impact every man, woman, child, and every company in the world if it was successful. So a good friend of mine introduced me to Protocol Labs, the creator of Filecoin."

Filecoin's Interplanetary File System (IPFS) enables users to store and transfer content in a peer-to-peer manner. It is the heart of Filecoin, containing three components; unique identification via content addressing, content linking through directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and content discovery via distributed hash tables. 

As its incentive layer, Filecoin serves to verify that all data is stored with the appropriate cryptographic proofs. Storage providers on Filecoin have two primary sources of revenue, block rewards and network fees. Block rewards are allocated proportionally based on submitted cryptographic proofs of the data they store. 

Currently, there are about 25,000 transactions on the Filecoin blockchain per day and in total there is about 127 pebibytes (1PiB = 1,125,900 Gigabytes) worth of data stored on it. In terms of total capacity, Filecoin developers say that the network is currently at around 10% of the AWS' storage capacity. 

Filecoin network metrics | Source: Starboard Ventures 

At the beginning of the year, storing data on Filecoin was at less than 1% of the cost of comparable services on AWS. But now, Evran explains that some storage costs have fallen into negative territory, while the typical storage costs have also decreased to less than 0.5% of centralized providers.

"With such a magnitude of cost reduction, many small businesses and freelancers worldwide can now afford to store people's data." He continues: "It's similar to how Airbnb unlocked the ability for average homeowners to host guests, which wouldn't have been possible in a hotel-dominated world."

For Evran, the novel Filecoin Virtual Machine is an exciting technological development for the ecosystem this year. "Filecoin has been a storage and retrieval market thus far. But what the FVM can unlock is a multibillion-dollar DeFi economy on top of Filecoin," he said. 

"With complete compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), developers can build across the two networks. We could bring up new use cases such as on-chain voting, data-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), decentralized verifiable computation, etc."

At the moment, Filecoin storage providers have about one billion dollars in collateral to store deals and grow operations. Via further updates, it is possible to create DeFi instruments that auto-renew deals for token holders, creating essentially a 'perpetual storage' network. 

Going forward, Evran explains that his vision is to see Protocol Labs and Filecoin to become a hub for building decentralized technologies. "We helped seed the foundation of IPFS, which is now used by every single major blockchain from Ethereum and Polkadot. But we also want people to come to our community and develop something transformational that's aligned with our values for Web 3.0. In spite of the ongoing crypto winter, Filecoin still holds its place among top players with a total market cap of $1.8 billion. 

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Harvard University and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web Plan to Preserve Digital Information

Harvard University and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web Plan to Preserve Digital InformationOn July 27, the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) announced it will be supporting an initiative with Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab (LIL) called the “Democratizing Open Knowledge” program. With FFDW’s support, LIL plans to explore decentralized technologies that can preserve digital information. Democratizing Open Knowledge While there’s a lot of information to […]

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