The Growth of Filecoin Plus and Upcoming Notary Elections

The Filecoin Plus (Fil+) program is a layer of social trust on top of the Filecoin network to help incentivize the storage of real, valuable data sets. Clients looking to onboard data storage onto the network apply to community-selected Notaries to receive DataCap, which can then be used to incentivize storage providers to take storage deals.

This winter, Filecoin Plus held its fourth round of Notary elections. The Filecoin Plus team solicited applications from hundreds of community members and organizations, and a final list of Notaries was selected are are now active.

What is a Filecoin Plus Notary?

Filecoin Notaries are selected to serve as fiduciaries for the Filecoin Network and are responsible for allocating DataCap to clients with valuable storage use cases. While the Filecoin Plus program is open to anyone in the broader community, notaries play an important role in shaping the direction of the program through governance decisions. The base responsibilities of notaries include:

Allocating DataCap responsibly to clients to subsidize reliable and valuable storage on the Filecoin network.
Ensuring that in the allocation of the DataCap, no party is given excessive trust in any form that might jeopardize the network.
Following operational guidelines, keeping a record of decision flow, and responding to audit requests of the allocation decisions.

The Filecoin Plus community adds yet another level of trust to the network so everyone can be sure their data is living on a trustworthy source for good.

Notary Applications and Election:

The most recent Filecoin Plus application program saw nearly double the amount of applicants from the last round and more than four times the number from round two. More than 90 new organizations and individuals joined the Filecoin Plus community recently, putting the number of notaries over 100 globally, representing North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

Through the collaboration of notaries and the entire Filecoin community, more than 268,000 new FIL are minted every day, and more than 602 PiB of DataCap has been allocated to valuable data.

The Governance team is looking ahead and projecting another election cycle in Q3 of 2023. Applicants must submit a proposal that addresses four main criteria:

Time Commitment: Length of time spent engaging in the Filecoin community
Industry Reputation: Effort and contribution to growing the Filecoin ecosystem
Allocation Strategy: Detailed allocation strategy for Datacap requests and anticipated distribution rate for Datacap
Engagement: Commitment to service agreements for both the amount of time and participation an applicant will make

Recent Growth of Filecoin Plus

More than 300 clients have onboarded large datasets through the Filecoin Plus program (e.g., datasets that exceed 100TiB in storage size). Clients range from the USC Shoah Foundation, to Web3 platforms such as OpenSea. Other notable efforts to onboard valuable data into the Filecoin network include:

UC Berkeley collaborating with Seal Storage for storing physics research.
GenRAIT leveraging Estuary to store critical genomics data on Filecoin.
Starling Labs research center storing sensitive digital records of human history.
Eweison (a fast growing host of photographs, illustrations, and vector files in China) using Filecoin for data preservation.

Get Involved

There are many ways to get involved with the Filecoin Plus program. Join the Filecoin Plus community by participating in issues and discussions on GitHub. There, you’ll find both client onboarding repos and Filecoin Plus project repos. And find the selected notaries and process outline for the Filecoin Plus program in our GitHub here.

You can also join the biweekly Filecoin Plus Notary Governance calls — the next call is slated for March 14. On Filecoin Slack, check out the #fil-plus channel - a great resource for connecting with the community and learning more about the programs.