Recapping ETHDenver: IPC Announcement, Exploring DePIN, and Connecting with the Community

ETHDenver brought together founders, developers, and builders from across the Filecoin ecosystem for a week of collaboration and innovation –– to usher the network into a new era of adoption and growth.

At the Spork Castle, Filecoin Foundation team hosted lightning talks and demos in our booth. Juan Benet stopped by the Filecoin Orbit Ecosystem Showcase for a community AMA. And FF’s Clara Tsao took the ETHDenver stage to talk about building the next generation of data storage for artificial intelligence systems.

Read on to see what you might have missed.

Scaling Network Innovation

Molly Mackinlay, EngRes Lead at Protocol Labs, took to the ETHDenver stage for her talk, Filecoin: the Storage Layer of Web3. She covered top 2024 themes for the Filecoin network including:

Filecoin L2s: Powering compute over data and DePIN
Filecoin: the storage layer for Web3
Scaling the Filecoin economy

Sarah Thiam gave a Crash Course to Getting Started with InterPlanetary Consensus at Filecoin Foundation Booth, outlining how IPC enables highly customizable L2s and subnets, and hierarchical consensus that traces back to the L1, ensuring security and creating more building options for dapp developers.

Fluence announced the upcoming mainnet launch of its Interplanetary Consensus (IPC)-powered decentralized serverless computing platform, which offers cheaper, provable, and truly decentralized computing for Web3 builders. With Fluence and IPC, developers will be able to create and monetize next-gen web applications.

Web3 and AI

The intersection of AI and Web3 was a hot topic at ETHDenver. FF Founding Officer Clara Tsao shared her talk, Filecoin and AI: Building the Next Generation of Data Storage, with the ETHDenver audience. Yan Bo Ng supported the AI discussion by participating in an AI & DePIN panel at Fluence’s DE:PIN Day and delivering a talk on Filecoin, FVM, and AI at Filecoin Foundation Booth.

With decentralized storage, we can avoid paths that concentrate the power of AI into fewer hands while providing solutions for a wealth of decentralized players to build and maintain their AI data responsibly. Filecoin is built to handle the unprecedented scale of AI data growth on a future-proof network. And in addition to decentralizing data storage, decentralized computing capabilities made possible by Filecoin help decentralize and speed up the resource-intensive computation of AI models.

Filecoin as a DePIN Prototype

Another emerging theme at ETHDenver was decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). DePIN creates scalable alternatives to centralized computation, storage, and telecommunications networks by leveraging Web3 concepts such as decentralization, cryptoeconomics, open source, and transparency.

DePIN is gaining traction because of large addressable markets in these areas and the ongoing boom in generative artificial intelligence – which has created a surge in demand for related services. Meanwhile, global semiconductor shortages have made it difficult for hardware suppliers to keep up with the uptick in demand. Combined, these trends have accelerated the search for alternative ways to meet pressing infrastructure needs.

Filecoin Foundation leaned into DePIN across stages during ETHDenver. Solutions Architect Yan Bo Ng participated in a panel at Fluence’s DE:PIN Day, Dev Advocate Jenks Guo spoke at DePIN Denver Web3 Coffee House, and Founding Officer Clara Tsao joined a roundtable at DePIN Summer.

The Growing Filecoin Ecosystem

At FIL Dev Summit, developers, builders, and engaged ecosystem members came together to contribute to the core protocol and network evolution of Filecoin to drive meaningful impact and push Filecoin forward across four tracks: Filecoin Smart Storage, Filecoin Retrievals and Allocators, Retroactive Public Goods Funding, and Decentralized Compute & Decentralized Storage.

In a workshop on how to design and integrate Decentralized Compute and Decentralized Storage, Jonathan Victor and Stefaan Vervaet discussed the technical product requirements and integration points where compute and storage use cases intersect. Together with Daniel León and FF’s Governance Program Manager, Kaitlin Beegle, they detailed some of the existing Filecoin Improvement Proposals (FIPs) and processes helping to accelerate data onboarding with Decentralized Storage Alliance (DSA) members –– one of the most sought-after solutions in the network.

Other talks from Filecoin Foundation included Head of Community Porter Stowell on Opportunities in the Filecoin Ecosystem, Fil+ Program Manager Galen McAndrew on the Allocator Program and Onboarding, Head of Technical Programs Stef Magdalinski on the FF Grants Program, and Clara Tsao delivering closing remarks on how FF supports the Filecoin Community.

Onward

Thank you to the hundreds of builders who joined us on the ground in Denver to learn more about the benefits of the Filecoin network and the projects across our ecosystem that are working together to build the next generation of the web.

For more talks and workshops, check out our Filecoin Foundation at ETHDenver YouTube playlist.