From Messari by Mihai Grigore
Key Insights
- In Q3’24, Filecoin’s new storage deals increased by 16% QoQ. Storage utilization grew from 26% in Q2’24 to nearly 30% in Q3’24, while storage capacity fell 18% QoQ.
- Simultaneously, over 2,000 clients onboarded data on Filecoin by the end of Q3’24. Of those clients, 518 onboarded large datasets over 1,000 TiB.
- As of Sept. 30, 2024, over 4,500 unique contracts were deployed on the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM). DeFi net deposits on the FVM accounted for over 20 million FIL ($84 million) in Q3’24, primarily used in staking, liquid staking, and DEXs.
- Filecoin continues to develop as a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), creating a decentralized storage marketplace for enterprise adoption, as well as enabling decentralized compute and AI.
- In Q3’24, the ecosystem expanded through the announcement of the Filecoin Web Services (FWS) framework, offering a market for verifiable services for developers and users. Filecoin formed a series of AI partnerships to expand its data solutions.
Primer
Filecoin is building a marketplace for data services — with the first service being storage — on top of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). FIlecoin uses deals that price the storage based on a market of providers instead of fixed pricing. A storage deal is like a contract with a service level agreement (SLA) — users pay fees to providers to store data for a specified duration.
To keep data safe, Filecoin uses a cryptoeconomic incentive model to regularly verify the storage with zero-knowledge proofs. To incentivize storage providers to participate in deals, Filecoin rewards them with FIL, the network's native token. Storage providers are slashed if they fail to provide reliable uptime or act maliciously against the network.
To retrieve data, Filecoin users pay a retrieval provider to fetch data. Unlike storage deals, which involve transactions onchain, retrieval deals use payment channels to settle payments offchain, to enable faster retrieval. Besides storage and retrieval, Filecoin aims to offer an open market where compute power can be contracted to run over data, providing more efficient alternatives to traditional centralized systems.
Key protocol upgrades to enable compute-over-data services include smart contracts (the Filecoin Virtual Machine - FVM) and scaling (Interplanetary Consensus - IPC). The launch of the FVM in March 2023 brought Ethereum-style smart contracts to enable new use cases on Filecoin, including token leasing, perpetual storage, and compute. Besides growing its FVM ecosystem, Filecoin focuses on enterprise adoption.
