What’s New with the Filecoin Plus Notary Election and Filecoin Day Highlights from LabWeek23

Filecoin Plus Day during LabWeek23 showcased the revamped V5 Notary election cycle, zeroing in on Notary Allocator pathways. The changes aim to boost transparency, efficiency, and community engagement in the Filecoin Plus program.

Also during LabWeek23, Filecoin Day featured updates from Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), discussed the intersection of artificial intelligence and decentralized storage, and more.

Here’s a quick rundown:

Filecoin Plus Day

Filecoin Plus (Fil+) is a layer of social trust to incentivize the storage of real, valuable data sets on the Filecoin network. Since its inception, Filecoin Plus has scaled the amount of data stored, bringing 1.8 EiB of verified deals to the network!

During Filecoin Plus Day, the Fil+ team introduced key changes to the Notary election process, including:

1. New Notary Allocator pathways
2. Sunsetting large dataset Notaries
3. A rolling application cycle

The process will be similar to previous Notary election cycles, in which interested parties submit details to the Governance team for review. The GitHub ReadMe section will have everything you need to know about the upcoming election cycle.

What is a Filecoin Plus Allocator (Notary)?

Allocators act as fiduciaries for the Filecoin network and are trusted to responsibly allocate DataCap to help foster legitimate use cases.

Clients looking to onboard valuable data onto the network apply to Allocators to receive DataCap. Data clients then use DataCap to make deals with storage providers, who are incentivized to store this verified data as it increases their share of block rewards over time.

Filecoin Plus Day also covered the program principles, open source tooling, compliance, disputes, and community ownership and governance. 

Filecoin Day

Updates from FF & FFDW

FF Co-Founding Officer Megan Klimen outlined the Foundation’s work governing the Filecoin network, funding R&D projects for decentralized web technologies, and supporting the growth of the Filecoin ecosystem.

She also recapped a busy year of impactful events for the Foundation:

• FIL Paris welcomed over 1,000 attendees in Paris during EthCC.
• FIL Vegas shined a spotlight on storage providers and catalyzed conversations about decentralized storage, AI, and enterprise.
• Filecoin Orbit –– a community-run program of volunteers that host Filecoin events around the world –– had 150 ambassadors host over 190 events in 40+ countries.

Klimen outlined FF and FFDW’s social impact work with partners like Democracy’s Library, MuckRock, MIT Open Learning, and University of Maryland’s Easier Data Initiative, and highlighted the newly launched DWeb Impact Resources Hub –– a massive collection of blog posts, research papers, news, and tutorials at the intersection of the decentralized web and social good.

Filecoin and AI: Building the Next Generation of Data Storage

Experts estimate that AI-generated content could account for as much as 90% of information on the internet in just a few years.

FF Co-Founding Officer Clara Tsao discussed why the future of AI and enterprise data lies in decentralized storage. Key points include:

1. Scale and cost: AI models are trained on large datasets collected by governments, businesses, and academic institutions, or drawn from information publicly available. Filecoin is a leader in storing massive amounts of large public data, at a fraction of the cost of the current centralized market.
2. Trust in Proof of Storage: Filecoin’s proof-of-spacetime mechanism constantly proves that data is being stored securely, prevents tampering, and serves as a verifiable record of data integrity.
3. Resilience to monopoly data ownership: Filecoin relies on a robust, global network of storage providers to maintain access to data, rather than Big Tech corporations susceptible to single points of failure or privacy breaches.

Crossing the Streams: A Ghostbusters-themed Approach to Scaling the Filecoin Ecosystem

Danny O’Brien, Senior Fellow and DWeb Strategy at FF, presented compelling applications of data on the decentralized web, including: genomics, geodata, human rights applications, archiving the web, electoral results, open-source/free software resources, and more.

He also highlighted proton packs, or tooling currently available in the ecosystem, that the average person can plug in and use, such as UCAN, Station, open-source Filecoin tooling, etc.

O’Brien suggested that in order to scale the Filecoin ecosystem and DWeb more broadly, we need to “cross the streams:” meaning matching the tooling and unique elements of our community with promising applications and niche product market domains.

Who you gonna call? Filecoin Foundation.

Dogfooding Filecoin and Resources for Developers

Stef Magdalinksi, FF’s Senior Tech Lead, walked us through the User Experience Improvement Team’s (UXIT) experience dogfooding Filecoin tools from the developer perspective.

UXIT’s guiding principle is that a competent, but inexperienced user should be able to successfully achieve their goal in using a tool, without running into bugs, or needing to break out to refer to additional resources.

The UXIT team can help the broader Filecoin ecosystem with user testing in the design phase, pre- or post-launch. Reach out to [email protected] to work with FF’s UXIT team.

And to learn about upcoming events like Filecoin Day, subscribe to The Upload, Filecoin Foundation's newsletter for big ideas and news about the Filecoin ecosystem and the decentralized web.