Filecoin Mainnet Marks Three Years!

This week, Filecoin Foundation celebrates the three-year anniversary of the Filecoin network’s Mainnet launch. And our vision for a better, more decentralized web has never been more urgent.

Today’s internet is largely centralized, and most people say they don’t like that their data is in the hands of a few, ultra-powerful companies. In fact, 65% of Americans say they do not feel in control of how the information they share with websites and companies is used, according to a 2022 Filecoin Foundation survey.

Since 2020, Filecoin’s open ecosystem of developers, storage providers, storage clients and other network participants has become the world’s largest decentralized storage network:

Massive amounts of data:

Today the Filecoin network has more than 10 EiB of storage capacity
More than 3,300 storage provider systems
1.6 EiB of data is stored on the network
50M deals
130.4M NFTs

Strong ecosystem momentum

14.7K+ contributors on GitHub
More than 3,050 projects
More than 450 organizations building on the network

Community Highlights

Our community soared to new heights in the past three years and accomplished some incredible achievements. Just a few recent highlights of data stored on the network:

UC Berkeley is collaborating with Seal Storage for storing physics research on the network.
Atlas Experiment at CERN also collaborated with Seal Storage on a pilot project to explore decentralized cloud storage as an efficient and cost-effective option for archival data storage. In this R&D project, Seal Storage Technology has provided 10 pebibytes (PiBs) of cloud-based storage capacity to the ATLAS Experiment.
GenRAIT is leveraging Filecoin to store critical genomics data.
The Starling Lab and Rolling Stone created an interactive Web3 archive to authenticate and preserve records of alleged war crimes. The complete digital records are stored on Filecoin and IPFS.
China's fastest-growing host of photographs, illustrations, and vector files, Ewesion, uses Filecoin for data preservation.
DeSci Labs is tackling the “Replication Crisis,” in scientific research by leveraging Filecoin and IPFS. Results reported in scientific papers are frequently unable to be reproduced and independently verified by other researchers – and DeSci is using decentralized data storage to help address this problem.
Democracy’s Library has uploaded over 1 petabyte of data to the Filecoin network with datasets that include information collected by the Internet Archive in a 16-year-old project, called the “End of Term Crawl,” capturing and saving U.S. government websites at the end of presidential administrations.

Filecoin Foundation (FF) is one of many contributors to the Filecoin ecosystem, facilitating governance of the Filecoin network, funding research and development projects, and supporting the growth of the Filecoin ecosystem and community.

Throughout the last three years, FF has awarded hundreds of developer grants to inspire more builders to engage with the Filecoin network. And our Filecoin Foundation and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web Project Partners, such as Distributed Press, Guardian Project, OpenArchive, MuckRock, and Prelinger Archives, are creating and supporting better technology to preserve humanity’s most important information.

What’s Next for the Network

It took humankind until 2011 to generate 1 ZB of data. Now, Holon Global Investments predicts humans will produce 75,000 ZB of data by 2040. With data fueling advancements in artificial intelligence and computing, decentralized storage provides a more equitable and reliable solution to handle massive amounts of data.

Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM)

This past spring, the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) launched on the Filecoin network, solidifying the network as an L1 uniquely positioned to power the open data economy. With data, AI, and compute, there is more to come for FVM!

Learn more at fvm.filecoin.io.

Retrievals

Project Saturn, a decentralized CDN network built on Filecoin launched in 2022, aims to democratize the CDN market. In just under a year, Saturn has reached over 4,800 global points of presence and the capacity to serve 478 million daily requests.

Learn more at retrieval.market.

Compute-Over-Data

Compute-over-data (CoD) platforms, like Bacalhau, aim to shift computational resources to where data is stored, rather than moving data for processing. This approach, particularly when deployed on decentralized protocols like Filecoin, offers flexible and scalable solutions for data processing, providing more efficient alternatives to traditional centralized systems in the era of Big Data and AI.

Learn more at cod.cloud.

Interplanetary Consensus

The next frontier in Filecoin scalability is Interplanetary Consensus (IPC), unlocking unmatched capacity and customizability, and enabling new use cases.

Learn more at fil.space.

Governance

FIP001v2 initiative is a project led by Filecoin Foundation introducing changes to the Filecoin Improvement Process (FIPs) and governance process.

Thank you!

Today, we say a big thank you to the storage providers, builders, researchers, enterprises, clients, and all those helping to build a better internet and preserve humanity's most important information!

To celebrate, we’re offering 10% on the Filecoin Foundation Swag Store with the code HBDFILECOIN (ends on Friday, Oct. 20).