Celebrating Filecoin Public Goods

The Filecoin protocol and its underlying technology are critical public goods that thousands of stakeholders rely on around the world. Today we celebrate 10+ teams committed to the decentralization and preservation of public goods tools & infrastructure, the new FIL RetroPGF program rewarding new public goods contributions, and the ongoing commitment from major Filecoin supporters towards advancing the growth of public goods in the Filecoin Ecosystem.

The Filecoin Network and Community have Grown Massively since 2020

The Filecoin network has seen tremendous growth since mainnet launch in October 2020, and today is the world’s largest decentralized storage network. The diverse ecosystem of Filecoin Storage Providers, Developers, Data Clients, Token Holders and Ecosystem Partners is global and expanding.

Around 3,000 Storage Providers are storing humanity’s most valuable information and providing cryptographic proofs to verify storage on Filecoin.
Over 1,800 data clients, from CERN to Solana to the Internet Archive, are storing their data on the Filecoin network, totaling nearly 2 EiB of data!
There are millions of unique network stakeholders, and thousands who are leasing their tokens to enable more decentralized storage services.
Hundreds of successful, independent ecosystem teams and projects from around the world are building on or with the Filecoin ecosystem to further enhance its utility.
Important community enablement and governance systems are funded and maintained by many teams, including Filecoin Foundation (“FF”) which helps steward grant programs, the Filecoin Improvement Proposal Process, and the Orbit Community Ambassador program.

Hundreds of Teams Invest in Public Goods for the Filecoin Community

Over the past 3+ years, the Filecoin community has come together to create and fund many programs, tools, and systems to advance network development and growth. Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs have participated actively in this community, along with many other key stakeholders such as GLIF, Web3mine, Titan, IPFS Force, ChainSafe, and many others who continually dedicate energy and resources to ensuring the development, availability, and maintenance of critical public goods that advance both Filecoin and the decentralized web at large. To name a few:

OSS Repos, Tools, and Docs: Over the years, Protocol Labs has helped grow and develop many critical OSS building blocks used by Filecoin - such as IPNI and Boost, Drand, the Filecoin Docs, along with specs & implementations for IPFS, libp2p, Multiformats and many other OSS projects that now power Filecoin and many other blockchains.
Filecoin Implementations Development: Developers from around the world have been adding to and updating components of the Filecoin stack for years. For example, 3 separate client implementations join together to enhance the network’s resilience by bringing client diversity to the network and continuously supporting protocol evolution: Lotus, the reference implementation in Go, has been maintained by a team within Protocol Labs since pre-mainnet launch; Venus, another Go implementation, is stewarded by the IPFSForce team; Forest, a Rust implementation, was created by ChainSafe.
Critical Ecosystem Tooling: Many network teams have built critical tooling to set a solid foundation for the network’s liveness and visibility, and to enable builders to develop applications on Filecoin. For example, Starboard received funding from FF to build out the Filecoin Network Health Dashboard and the Filecoin DeFi Leaderboard. Additionally, Zondax was supported to create Beryx, a Filecoin ecosystem explorer. Multiple GLIF projects are also building interoperable apps and development tools for the network, including the Explorer, Wallet, and RPC APIs.
Helping Onboard Humanity’s Most Important Data to Filecoin: While most data stored on Filecoin is independently onboarded via Storage Providers or Data Clients, some of these public datasets are supported via grants from PL, FF, or others - including Solana’s chain history, data from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, and data associated with Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. The Decentralized Storage Alliance (DSA) is also helping spearhead architecture for decentralized storage use cases.
Builder Programs & Community Events: Filecoin is a global community and as a result, needs global gatherings to connect the ecosystem. Hundreds of teams across the community have joined forces to host and sponsor events, workshops, and seminars all around the world including: Fil Dev Summits; FIL-City Events (e.g., FIL Vegas, FIL Hong Kong, FIL Bangalore); major conferences (e.g., Consensus, ETHDenver, and EthCC); LabWeeks; Filecoin Orbit community events; and more. This also includes programs to reach the broader web3 developer audience through hackathons, incubators, and builder programs. In 2023 alone, Filecoin (and the Filecoin Virtual Machine) was featured in over 20 hackathons and formed partnerships with major accelerators including Tachyon, Graph Paper Capital, and ETHGlobal!

As a community, continually investing in the growth and maintenance of Filecoin public goods is critical for the long-term success and health of the ecosystem. To achieve this, many teams have formed in the last year with exactly this purpose: creating, growing, and maintaining Filecoin public goods.

Highlighting 10 Public Goods Teams Dedicated to Maintaining & Growing Filecoin

Hundreds of independent developers, community members, and ecosystem teams work together every day to collaboratively grow the Filecoin ecosystem. Today, we are excited to recognize a number of flourishing “network goods” teams that are working to improve and maintain the Filecoin protocol, ecosystem, network infrastructure, and open source projects. Some of these teams were previously incubated inside organizations like Protocol Labs, and are now fully autonomous teams within the Filecoin community as PL has evolved into an innovation network of many independent organizations. 🚀

Today, each of these teams are 1) composed of seasoned Filecoin engineers, operators, researchers, and builders intimately familiar with the protocol, 2) sponsored by public goods funding from FF, PL, and other groups, and 3) dedicated to public goods development and growth for the Filecoin ecosystem. 🎉

FilOz is an independent protocol R&D team focusing on Filecoin protocol improvement and security; maintaining OSS code bases like Lotus, Builtin-Actors, and ref-fvm; and helping grow the OSS developer community’s participation in Filecoin protocol development. Follow along with their work at #fil-lotus-dev and #fil-protocol in the Filecoin Slack.
Curio Storage is dedicated to supporting, maintaining, and improving storage provider operational efficiency, building new software and features for Filecoin storage providers. Follow along on the Filecoin Slack channel #fil-curio-docs or at curiostorage.org.
FilPonto is dedicated to supporting Filecoin ecosystem partners with integration support, while coordinating chain infrastructure and tooling that makes Filecoin more accessible to a technical audience. Learn more about the team’s mission at filponto.io.
Elliptic Research focuses on Filecoin’s proofs & circuits and supports cryptographic security of Filecoin’s base protocol and proofs. The team can be reached on Filecoin Slack in the #fil-proofs channel and maintains the Proofs repository on GitHub.
Ansa Research is focused on releasing reports on distributed infrastructure networks and covering digital networks aiming to rebuild how internet infrastructure operates. Check out their Filecoin-specific resource, Filecoin TL;DR, to learn more.
CryptoEconLab is a collective of research scientists analyzing crypto’s economic challenges, including deep dives into the Filecoin ecosystem & cryptoeconomics.
NFT.Storage is transitioning into an endowed NFT preservation initiative alongside the newly formed NFT.Storage DAO, marking a significant step in paving the way for sustainable NFT preservation. Learn more at NFT.storage!
Chainsafe DevOps develops and runs network infrastructure services like the Filecoin chain snapshot service, network bootstrappers, and the Calibration testnet.
Filecoin Incentive Design Labs (FIDL) is a public goods team focused on creating tooling, monitoring systems, and experiments to improve the Filecoin Plus ecosystem. Learn more at fidl.tech.
Starboard Networks has taken on the new responsibility to maintain and improve the critical monitoring dashboards used by the Filecoin community and Filecoin Core Devs to track network upgrades and identify potential alerts. Follow along with their work at #starboard or dashboard.starboard.ventures.

In addition to these teams, there are many other teams & funds emerging in the PL network committed to advancing public goods in the Filecoin ecosystem - including IPNI, Glif, Public Goods Crypto (PGC), IPDX, Kariba Labs, FilStor, SEAD, and many more!

Together, these independent teams will continue to spearhead the creation of new implementations and integrations, participate in protocol design, offer public network services, and engage in impactful working groups. Each team builds upon years of experience within the Filecoin community, benefits from significant public goods funding from various network stakeholders, and ultimately strengthens our collective, sustainable future because of the dedication to preserving Filecoin public goods.

Scaling and Supporting more Filecoin Public Goods Initiatives

In addition to the valuable initiatives, tooling, and teams described above - the Filecoin community has a new resource in its arsenal to attract, reward, and sustain Public Goods initiatives in the ecosystem! The FIL-RetroPGF-1 funding round (inspired by Optimism’s RetroPGF) was launched in early March 2024 to further support and fund the growth of Filecoin Public Goods. Over 100 teams were nominated by the community to apply for retroactive funding to reward impactful contributions to the Filecoin ecosystem! To learn more about the program, we invite interested parties to watch this talk from the latest FIL Dev Summit at ETH Denver or get involved in #fil-retropgf on Filecoin Slack.

New ways to improve public goods funding best practices were also discussed at LabWeek Public Goods, a decentralized conference hosted by Protocol Labs & the Foresight Institute in SF in April 2024. The first-of-its-kind LabWeek brought together experts to discuss how to support essential resources for a better funded, sustainable, and fairer digital future. Recaps of talks and presentations from the week-long event will be posted to the LabWeek schedule.

Last but not least, all Filecoin stakeholders and community members are invited to participate in Filecoin public goods through network governance, sponsoring a research project, joining an ecosystem team, or hosting a talk, track, or event at an upcoming FIL Dev Summit. We look forward to seeing the impact of your contributions reverberate throughout the Filecoin ecosystem!

Thank you, to the many community supporters dedicated to prioritizing the collective good of the Filecoin ecosystem. These efforts in championing public goods, coupled with all of the existing teams and individuals from around the world working on and contributing to the Filecoin ecosystem, are critical to continue driving Filecoin’s growth and innovation forward. To stay up-to-date on all things Filecoin, we invite you to bookmark the following resources: