How FIDL is Enhancing Transparency and Accountability in Fil+

In the past year, the Filecoin Plus (Fil+) program has evolved to help improve transparency and trust in the system by giving participants better tools to understand how Fil+ is working.

Filecoin Incentive Design Lab (FIDL) is a team in the Filecoin ecosystem focused on providing insights that help clients, storage providers, and allocators make informed decisions about how they engage with Fil+.

FIDL’s reporting tools and dashboards are designed to support Fil+ participants. This post explores what we can learn from the data and where the biggest challenges remain.

How Clients Can Use FIDL Client Reports to Strengthen Their Storage Strategy

For clients using Fil+, the goal is to store valuable, meaningful data in a way that aligns with the principles of the program. FIDL’s client reports are designed to help you assess how your storage choices align with best practices. Some insights available to clients include:

Distribution across storage providers: Are you working with a diverse set of providers across multiple regions?
Data redundancy: Are you over-replicating data across multiple SPs, or is your distribution optimal?
Retrievability: Are the SPs you work with ensuring that data is actually retrievable when needed?
IPNI reporting: How well is your data indexed for retrieval through Filecoin’s discovery mechanisms?

With these reports, clients can optimize their storage strategy to ensure long-term accessibility and compliance with Fil+ guidelines.

How Storage Providers Can Ensure High-Quality Service

For storage providers, participation in Fil+ means more than just accepting deals—it’s about building trust with clients and maintaining a strong reputation in the network. FIDL’s reports help SPs assess their standing and ensure they meet expectations.

Key insights available to SPs:

IPNI reporting quality: Ensuring your data indexing is accurate and up-to-date.
Retrievability metrics: Making sure clients can retrieve data as expected.
Sector efficiency: Storing data in a way that minimizes unnecessary padding and optimizes network resources.
Client diversity: Engaging with a broad range of clients rather than relying on a single source of deals.

Improving on these areas ensures that SPs continue to receive Datacap-backed deals and build strong relationships within the ecosystem.

How Allocators Can Guide Clients and SPs Toward Best Practices

Allocators are responsible for distributing Datacap effectively and ensuring that the clients they support are following best practices. Allocators can use FIDL’s reports as a tool to engage, educate, and support clients and storage providers.

Here are some examples of how allocators can use compliance reports:

Identify trends: Spot patterns in how clients are using Datacap and where adjustments may be needed.
Support clients in improving compliance: Offer guidance to clients who may need help optimizing their storage approach.
Ensure Datacap is being used as intended: Monitor how allocations are impacting the broader ecosystem and make data-driven decisions about future distributions.

To support allocators in this effort, FIDL provides detailed reports that highlight potential issues including allocation reports and broad compliance reports. You can check out samples in this compliance report.

Seeing the Bigger Picture: Fil+ Compliance Trends and Insights

While individual reports help participants track their standing, it’s also important to understand how Fil+ is evolving at a program-wide level. FIDL has developed real-time compliance dashboards that give a broader view of network-wide trends. Check out FIDL’s Compliance Dashboard and you’ll see:

More Datacap is being allocated to high-quality deals: Since March last year, the percentage of Datacap allocated to deals meeting best practices has increased steadily.
Retrievability remains a challenge: While there has been progress, there are gaps in ensuring stored data remains accessible when needed.
Storage distribution is improving, but work remains: More clients are working with multiple SPs, but there is still room to improve balance and redundancy across providers.

Looking Ahead: Continuing to Improve Fil+ Through Transparency

FIDL’s goal is to ensure that every participant – storage clients, storage providers, and allocators – in Fil+ has access to the information they need to make informed decisions.

Looking forward, the team is focusing on:

Further improving retrievability tracking and insights.
Enhancing reporting capabilities to make compliance data easier to act on.
Providing better tools for clients, SPs, and allocators to collaborate and optimize their participation in Fil+.

Transparency and accountability don’t have to be about rigid enforcement—they can be about empowering the community with the right tools and knowledge to make smarter decisions.