Filecoin: The Starry Sea on the Left, Financial Inspiration on the Right

This article was first published on the WeChat public account BlockVC on October 25, 2020.

After more than five years of operation of the Bitcoin system, a new wave of innovative projects driven by blockchain technology, represented by Ethereum, began to emerge. IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System) was also founded during this period by Juan Benet in 2014. Benet released a draft white paper describing "a peer-to-peer distributed file system that aims to connect all computing devices to the same file system." In the same year, Benet also established Protocol Labs, a research lab for network protocols and the parent company of IPFS, and applied to join the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator, which accepted the Protocol Labs team into its summer research program in 2014.

In February 2015, the alpha version of IPFS was opened for public testing; a year later, Protocol Labs completed a $3 million funding round from investors including DCG. In 2017, with the ICO wave driven by the soaring price of ETH and massive funding for projects like EOS, Protocol Labs launched Filecoin, an incentive layer blockchain project associated with the IPFS protocol, and completed a massive public offering of $257 million on CoinList. According to the information disclosed by Filecoin at that time, as of June 2017, IPFS network merchants had stored over 5 billion unique content files, and the data continued to grow.

Figure 1: Filecoin Primer Results Presentation, Protocol Labs

After seven years of development, the IPFS storage network has now grown into a global distributed storage option, and the Filecoin blockchain mainnet is tentatively scheduled to officially launch in July-August 2020 after several delays, with the long-awaited FIL token also set to launch. Since 2018, the blockchain and digital asset industry in China has maintained a high level of attention to the progress of IPFS technology and ecology, developing a thriving ecosystem around IPFS and Filecoin. This research report will elaborate on the technology and applications of IPFS from the perspective of the evolution of distributed storage and first principles, extending to the incentive logic of Filecoin built on IPFS, showcasing the ecological landscape surrounding IPFS.

1. The Yesterday and Today of Distributed Storage

Distributed storage refers to the provision of storage services as a whole through a large number of ordinary servers connected via the internet. This storage method typically features scalability, reliability, high performance, and ease of maintenance. In the early days of the internet, applications such as email were built on centralized servers and a series of transmission protocols. Records and information generated from each conversation were stored centrally on single-point servers. If a single point of failure occurred, the server data would become inaccessible, and the application would fail to operate. With the vigorous development of computer systems and various application software, centralized storage began to undergo transformation, and P2P transmission methods gradually emerged.

Distributed Storage in the "Pre-Blockchain Era"

In 2000, a college student from the United States, Shawn Fanning, developed software called Napster, which allowed users to download MP3 files they wanted while also uploading their own MP3 files for others to download. This led to the emergence of the prototype of P2P file transfer technology, inspiring the development of eMule and the well-known BT (BitTorrent) protocol. Since then, centralized storage has undergone a significant transformation, no longer relying on centralized servers, and peer-to-peer file storage and transfer applications became popular. For example, as a content distribution protocol, BT has many advantages—unlike centralized servers, the more people downloading the same content under the BT protocol, the faster the download speed. This method allows the download server to handle multiple large file download requests simultaneously without consuming a lot of bandwidth.

Magnet links also developed on this basis, not relying on document-based IP addresses or locators, but identifying and searching for documents through hash function values in a distributed database, meaning that each file content has a unique hash value as its ID, using distributed hash table technology to achieve addressing and storage across the entire network. Because it does not depend on a host that is in a startup state to download documents, it is particularly suitable for peer-to-peer networks without a central server.

Distributed Storage Solutions Based on Blockchain Technology

Blockchain itself integrates distributed storage, asymmetric encryption, and consensus algorithms. The distributed storage solutions based on blockchain technology share similarities with BT protocol technology in that they both shard the files to be stored and store the fragments on various nodes. In this solution, the characteristics of blockchain technology, such as data encryption and privacy protection, and the immutability brought by decentralization, surpass centralized servers.

In such solutions, there is usually a designed incentive layer with token rewards—when nodes contribute their storage resources to the network, they can earn the corresponding ecological tokens of that network. Current projects utilizing blockchain technology for storage include IPFS, Storj, Sia, and others.

2. The Application and Principles of IPFS Technology: A Clever Combination of HTTP Transmission Protocol, Git Version Control Protocol, and BitTorrent Transmission Protocol

The Essence of IPFS from First Principles

IPFS is essentially a file sharing and transmission protocol, similar to the HTTP hypertext transfer protocol, which is one of the most successful and primary transmission protocols on the modern internet. However, unlike HTTP, which follows a client-server model, IPFS is a distributed node network that can both serve and request data.

In the client-server model, the "client" (usually a web browser) sends requests to the "server" (usually a file hosting server) for web elements (images, web pages, documents, etc.) and receives responses that will be displayed on the screen. There are many "proxies" (computers and machines) between the client and server that help relay HTTP messages between the two.

The drawbacks of this model and HTTP are as follows:

• Inefficient Structure: The structure of HTTP only allows a client and server to request and serve a single web element at a time. This is why some web pages with multiple web elements take longer to load than others. While HTTP can effectively move smaller files, it becomes increasingly inefficient and costly in a world where users generate a large number of data islands daily.
• Centralized Network: Because web elements and data are requested from a single host server, it makes these central servers vulnerable to DDoS attacks and data breaches. These centralized networks make themselves susceptible to government or institutional censorship. In 2017, in response to the Catalonia independence referendum, the Spanish government censored several websites and applications related to the referendum.

In response, the IPFS model creatively provides a new model to avoid the above issues:

• Efficient Structure: On IPFS, each node can provide content to peer nodes or request content from them. The more nodes there are on the network, the more efficient the data transmission becomes. Clients on IPFS do not request a single web element at a time to complete a web page; instead, they request multiple web elements from multiple nodes. As a highly simplified example, a web page using the client-server model with four web elements would require four client requests, and the server responses would be executed sequentially to fully deliver the page. Using IPFS, four client requests would be made to four servers simultaneously to deliver the page.
• Distributed Network: Nodes on IPFS are assigned and possess equal power, rather than relying on a single server farm to store and transmit data. If one node is attacked or goes offline, data can still be retrieved from other nodes on the network. The distributed network reduces the attack surface for censorship. In response to the Spanish government's censorship actions, the Catalonia government used IPFS to upload previously banned websites and made them available to the public.

Figure 2: Diagram of Centralized vs. Distributed Networks, The Block Research

It can be seen that through these two main differences, IPFS, compared to the HTTP protocol, achieves permanent storage of information that is immutable and cannot be deleted, as well as resource sharing. IPFS saves storage space by not storing duplicate files through content addressing, while its distributed characteristics and encrypted storage allow the entire network to avoid single points of failure and provide better privacy and security compared to storage solutions like Baidu Cloud. In the long run, the IPFS protocol and its new features have significant advantages over HTTP, and the trend of IPFS and HTTP protocols complementing each other and gradually merging will be inevitable.

The Design Inspiration of IPFS

To achieve the above features, the technical design route of IPFS integrates various existing distributed systems and storage technologies and innovates upon them, making it a culmination of blockchain technology in the field of distributed storage.

The IPFS network draws attributes from previous distributed peer-to-peer systems, including distributed hash tables, BitTorrent, Git, and SFS. According to its white paper, this creates "a single cohesive system that is greater than the sum of its parts."

Distributed Hash Table: The Distributed Hash Table (DHT) is a distributed system used to store and retrieve "values" (data) associated with keys in a peer node network. Each value corresponds to a different key, which provides the permissions needed to access that value. In a DHT, all information is evenly distributed among the nodes, and each node has an equal opportunity to be chosen to store key-value pairs.

IPFS utilizes Kademlia DHT, Coral DSHT, and S/Kademlia's DHT implementations to improve lookup efficiency and reduce attack vectors such as Sybil attacks.

Figure 3: Diagram of Distributed Hash Table, Wikipedia.org

BitTorrent: BitTorrent is a successful peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. In 2018, this protocol accounted for 4.16% of global internet traffic. IPFS uses the data exchange protocol of BitTorrent to reward resource-contributing nodes and penalize resource-leaking nodes.

Git (Version Control System): A version control system records changes to files over time so that users can access specific versions at any time. Git has implemented a distributed version control system that allows a group of distributed contributors to track changes made to files by multiple parties. IPFS has implemented this control system in its protocol. On IPFS, the data stored on the network is divided into multiple fragments, which are saved by nodes on the network. By implementing version control, IPFS ensures that these fragments are correctly organized and that file changes are properly updated.

SFS (Self-Authenticating File System): SFS is a distributed file naming system. IPFS uses it in its InterPlanetary Naming System (IPNS). Using IPNS, users can generate verifiable addresses that link to IPFS content.

The IPFS Protocol Stack

The IPFS protocol includes the following seven sub-protocols:

• Identity: IPFS nodes receive a NodeId, which is an encrypted hash of their public key. The NodeId helps identify nodes in the IPFS network. When nodes connect, they exchange public keys and check if the encrypted hash matches the public key. If they match, the connection is established; if not, the node disconnects.
• Network: IPFS helps manage the connections between peer nodes on its network and provides functions for transmission, reliability, connectivity, integrity, and authenticity. IPFS is also designed to work on top of other protocols, allowing its annotations to create custom addresses using its multiaddr feature.
• Routing: IPFS routes information between nodes using a DHT based on S/Kademlia and Coral. Small data values (equal to or less than 1KB) are stored directly on the IPFS DHT. Larger values store references to nodes that may be able to serve the data.
• Exchange: IPFS uses a BitSwap-inspired exchange function to swap data between nodes. BitSwap is essentially a data marketplace where nodes offer data blocks to other nodes in exchange for the data blocks they need. If a node does not have the data needed by its peer nodes, it will strive to find that data.
• Objects: IPFS objects contain data and links to other objects. Since data is fragmented and distributed across multiple nodes in the network, IPFS uses a Merkle Directed Acyclic Graph to retrieve data fragments efficiently to compile the entire file.
• Files: IPFS can model the hierarchical architecture of the control file system based on the Merkle Directed Acyclic Graph.
• Naming: IPNS allows users to create readable links pointing to their content.

With a solid technical stack and standing on the shoulders of many previous technologies, IPFS has been running smoothly for over four years since its release in January 2015. Currently, there are hundreds of applications running on the IPFS protocol, with millions of nodes worldwide. Unlike many decentralized projects launched in the blockchain era, IPFS has proven its practicality. Statistics show that in 2019, the IPFS public network grew 30 times, with Google Chrome, Firefox, D.Tube, IPWB, Ethereum, Origin, and others joining the IPFS network. Today, IPFS is storing effective data at a rate of 2.5EB/day for the entire world.

Developers continue to contribute to the open-source protocol, users continue to upload files to IPFS, and dApp developers continue to utilize its network for data storage. In just over four years, IPFS has established itself as a key infrastructure for the decentralized web. Several mature applications based on IPFS have already been launched, including OpenBazaar stores, Brave browser, Peerpad collaborative editor, and more.

Figure 4: Mapping Out Projects Using IPFS, The Block Research

3. Filecoin: Incentive Mechanism and Public Chain System

As mentioned above, the IPFS protocol defines how files are stored, retrieved, and transmitted in a distributed system, enabling permanent and decentralized preservation and sharing of files. It is a content-addressable, peer-to-peer distributed protocol. Although a series of advancements have been made at the protocol level, the lack of an incentive mechanism has hindered the further development of IPFS.

Filecoin (token FIL), launched by Protocol Labs in 2017, is an incentive application layer and blockchain public chain system built on the IPFS network. Filecoin primarily relies on the distributed storage technology provided by IPFS, the on-chain and off-chain trading market realized by Ethereum smart contracts, and efficient node discovery and data transmission achieved by libp2p.

Filecoin stimulates the long-term operation of nodes through three types of revenue: storage, retrieval, and block rewards, better serving the entire network ecosystem. With a total issuance of 2 billion FIL tokens, 70% is allocated for miner rewards, 15% for Protocol Labs, 10% for public and private investors, and 5% is reserved by the foundation for ecological development. The issuance speed of FIL is divided into three parts: 50% of miner rewards will be issued within six years; the foundation and Protocol Labs will release linearly over six years; and investors will be distributed within one year.

From the token distribution of FIL, most of the FIL supply will depend on miner rewards. Apart from investors participating in the FIL public offering who may consider trading tokens after FIL is listed on exchanges, other industry participants mainly engage in the project by participating in Filecoin network mining.

Filecoin Consensus and Mining Mechanism

Filecoin adopts a hybrid consensus mechanism: with Expected Consensus (EC) as the main, and Proof of Replication (PoRep) and Proof of Spacetime (PoSt) as supplements. Expected Consensus is the main block consensus of the Filecoin blockchain, a probabilistic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism. Unlike general Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, after each round of leader election, on average, one participant can submit a block.

Expected Consensus possesses fairness, unpredictability, and verifiability. Filecoin assigns weights to each generated block, with the chain with the highest weight becoming the main chain. The weight of a block depends on two factors: the number of parent blocks and the storage capacity of the chain. Due to the collateral mechanism in Filecoin, miners tend to mine the chain with the most parent blocks and the highest storage capacity, achieving effective convergence.

There are two benefits to using Expected Consensus in Filecoin: first, high transaction efficiency, ensuring that miners' work is not wasted. Second, it can control forks. Filecoin encourages miners to choose the most efficient chain through weights and collateral mechanisms, penalizing miners who mine multiple chains simultaneously.

In EC consensus, the probability of a miner winning the election is proportional to the miner's current storage capacity, which is measured by Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime. Proof of Spacetime can utilize proof chains and timestamps to demonstrate that miners have stored data for a certain duration, allowing verification even if validators are offline, effectively preventing temporary data generation attacks.

Proof of Replication can prove that data has been successfully created in a specific sector. It also prevents witch attacks, external data source attacks, and generation attacks. Proof of Replication prevents miners from using different methods to store less data than they promised to obtain extra rewards.

Figure 5: Proof of Replication Preventing Attacks, Protocol Labs

Additionally, it is important to note that participation and mining in Filecoin do not just require mining machines; they also require staking tokens. To prevent data loss for clients, Filecoin has set up a staking mechanism, which can also be understood as a miner penalty mechanism. When a transaction agreement is generated, miners will store the data provided by clients in the network, in an area called a sector. Each sector will contain the stored file content and the promised storage duration, ensuring that clients can freely use their stored data within the agreed storage duration.

When a miner wants to add a sector to the Filecoin network, they need to stake a locked amount of funds. This locked amount consists of two parts: FIL tokens held by the miner and part of the block rewards. If a miner goes offline during the promised storage duration, they will lose part of their locked funds. If a miner completely stops their storage activities, they may lose all locked tokens.

Storage Market and Retrieval Market within the Filecoin Ecosystem

In Filecoin, there are built-in storage and retrieval markets for miners to participate in mining and accounting, ensuring that miners receive tokens paid by users through a bidding and order-snatching system. Storage miners provide hard disk capacity in the market, earning storage fees from users, while also gaining the right to create new blocks (mine) through Proof of Spacetime, earning mining rewards; retrieval miners help users retrieve saved content addresses from the IPFS network, thus earning retrieval mining rewards.

Storage Market: The Filecoin storage market is a verifiable market validated by the blockchain network. In the Filecoin storage market, clients propose storage data needs, while storage miners provide their storage space. Storage is not a one-time service; it requires the stability and continuity of miners. Miners can earn rewards in three ways: transaction fees; block rewards; and network transaction acceleration fees. Transaction fees and network transaction acceleration fees are paid in advance by clients, while block rewards are generated by the system.

Retrieval Market: The Filecoin retrieval market is an off-chain market that provides clients with the data they need to retrieve, with retrieval miners providing the retrieval services. Retrieval miners do not participate in the block generation process and directly receive service fees from clients. The data sources for retrieval miners can come from other clients, storage miners, or the IPFS network.

There are four differences between the storage market and the retrieval market: first, retrieval miners do not have time requirements for storing data and do not need to generate storage proofs. Second, any user in the network can provide data retrieval services without needing to stake FIL. Third, retrieval miners have high bandwidth requirements, needing to quickly process payments and data transfers, while storage miners have higher storage capacity requirements. Fourth, storage miners can earn block rewards, transaction fees, and network acceleration fees, while retrieval miners can only earn retrieval transaction fees.

Figure 6: Filecoin Economic Model, ipfs.cn

Filecoin Economic Model Analysis

From the above analysis, we can see that the main difference between Filecoin and the Bitcoin network lies in the nature of the services provided: storage is a long-term service, so the Filecoin network requires miners to work stably for long periods to maintain network stability, unlike the Bitcoin network, where miners can freely enter and exit. Therefore, Filecoin adopts a network benchmark reward model rather than a time-indexed decay model. This leads to the difficulty of household storage hardware meeting the requirements for participating in Filecoin mining in terms of operation, security, and stability; it is challenging for a typical household environment to ensure 24-hour uninterrupted internet and power supply while also timely submitting Proof of Spacetime, making household mining machines likely to be invalidated, and the threshold for miners is likely to be raised to a professional scale.

Looking separately, the demand in the Filecoin storage market primarily comes from the decentralized storage needs within the network, while the supply side consists of storage miners. Compared to traditional centralized storage or cloud service providers like Amazon or Google, Filecoin has significant scale and technical cost advantages, and according to market supply and demand theory, miners' quotes need to be lower than centralized storage to survive in the storage market. Therefore, it can be inferred that in the early stages of the Filecoin network, the demand in the storage market will mainly come from small and medium-sized clients with high privacy sensitivity and cost sensitivity. In the long term, the storage quotes and the scale of demand in the storage market will show a certain inverse correlation. In other words, storage miners may appropriately lower their quotes to obtain more storage orders, increasing their chances of obtaining block opportunities, while their revenue will ultimately depend on the rise in the price of FIL.

In the real-world environment, it is highly likely that there will not be much real storage demand in the early stages of Filecoin's launch, so early participating miners' earnings will mainly come from block rewards, and most of the effective data stored by miners during this phase will be data they generated themselves.

Filecoin encourages miners to contribute their hard drives to build a distributed storage network through block rewards. When there is sufficient storage space on the Filecoin network and the network's security and stability reach a certain level, more and more institutions and individuals will begin to host their data on Filecoin network servers, and miners will start to generate storage mining revenue.

Retrieval demand in the early stages mainly comes from blockchain users with valuable information needs. The content stored on the early IPFS network has not yet scaled, and retrieval services are similarly less advantageous compared to centralized networks. As the IPFS storage market gradually scales, the importance and revenue of retrieval miners will also gradually increase. The price of FIL has little impact on retrieval miners; their revenue consists only of transaction fees and does not include block rewards. The optimal strategy for retrieval miners is to also become storage miners and appropriately lower their quotes to obtain more retrieval orders while improving network bandwidth utilization. In this case, retrieval miners can directly obtain data from clients.

When there is a certain amount of real data on the Filecoin network, retrieval demand will arise, and miners will have retrieval mining revenue. These three parts of revenue are complementary; only miners with a certain computational power advantage in the early stages will obtain more storage orders. The more real storage orders there are, the more effective data storage miners have in their servers, which will correspondingly allow them to earn more retrieval rewards in the later retrieval mining phase. From this development path, we can see a model similar to the development of the sharing economy in the internet.

Figure 7: Filecoin Economic Model, ipfs.cn

FIL Miners' Holding Strategy and Price Analysis

Based on statistics on the output of Filecoin investors, Protocol Labs, foundations, and miners, it is estimated that the total output in the first six months will be 34.11 million tokens per month, with a total output of 365.13 million tokens in the first year.

From a macro perspective, since various miners need to stake FIL to obtain block rewards, and FIL tokens are released linearly, the expected supply side will grow slowly, with the growth rate decreasing exponentially. In the long term, if the demand side's service demand gradually increases, it will determine that all market participants must continue to purchase FIL.

From a micro perspective, the stability of storage and retrieval service prices is important for users, so the prices of storage and retrieval transaction fees need to be anchored to fiat currencies or stablecoins, regardless of whether FIL rises or falls. When the price of FIL rises, clients will pay lower transaction fees and network acceleration fees in terms of FIL units, and the proportion of miners' block rewards in their revenue will increase. When the price of FIL falls, clients will pay higher transaction fees and network acceleration fees in terms of FIL units, and the proportion of miners' block rewards in their revenue will decrease. Assuming that only service demand factors are considered, when the price of FIL rises, the rate at which clients purchase FIL in the secondary market will slow down; when the price of FIL falls, the rate at which clients purchase FIL in the secondary market will increase, achieving the function of adjusting the secondary market.

In summary, the optimal strategy for miners is to hold FIL long-term. In addition to needing to stake FIL for mining, the price increase of FIL determines the miners' yield, as the transaction fees in the initial stages cannot cover mining costs.

As a distributed storage network, the core application scenario of FIL lies in commercial storage clients and miners' mining pledges, but the former will inevitably struggle to meet the high expectations of the current industry in the early stages of the network's launch. In the early stages of the mainnet launch, large-scale enterprise commercial data storage will consume a lot of time and hardware resources, meaning that large-scale commercial use is temporarily unrealistic.

Therefore, before the Filecoin network truly matures and stabilizes, with a massive influx of real commercial storage demand, the price of FIL will mainly be supported by miners who purchase tokens for staking and secondary market investors. The growth of miners and storage space, as well as the speculative enthusiasm in the secondary market, will largely determine the price trend of FIL.

4. The Ecological Landscape of IPFS

As a top-tier project that went online in 2015 and completed massive financing in 2017, the IPFS and Filecoin networks are finally entering a new chapter with the launch of the mainnet this year. Over the past few years, a prosperous ecosystem has developed and iterated around IPFS and Filecoin in the blockchain and digital asset industry.

Figure 8: IPFS and Filecoin Ecological Links, BlockVC Industry Research

In the upstream of the ecosystem, Protocol Labs and community developers continue to contribute to the network's development, while many blockchain projects adopt IPFS as their storage infrastructure, laying the foundation for the large-scale use of IPFS; the design and manufacturing of mining machines, unlike the specialized mining machines currently used for Bitcoin, do not require high-end chip development, so the design and manufacturing threshold for Filecoin mining machines is relatively low. China's mid-to-low-end manufacturing industry is well-developed, and participation in the industry is widespread, dating back to the fundraising of Filecoin in 2017.

Before 2019, so-called IPFS servers or Filecoin mining machines, although many products were packaged with server exteriors, actually had PC internals. The project officials also warned against participating in the purchase of so-called mining machines, and most of the mining machines during this phase ultimately became sales scams. With the gradual open-sourcing of Filecoin's code in 2019, the computational requirements were raised to be as important as storage, leading to the declaration of many previous "mining machines" as obsolete. By the end of 2019, the announcement that Filecoin mining would require GPUs led to another iteration of mining machines designed for Filecoin, raising hardware standards to 128GiB of memory, multi-core CPUs, and an NVIDIA 2080Ti graphics card. With the final launch of the testnet this year, cluster mining mode has become mainstream, and many miners have completed their layouts, entering the final stages of computational power preparation and network layer management debugging. It is reported that there are at least 200-300 domestic Filecoin mining machine sellers, with several leading manufacturers' sales exceeding 1 billion.

In the past three years, many miners who purchased various mining machines in advance have also adopted the increasingly popular cloud computing mechanism, collaborating with sales channels with traffic terminals to sell the computational power of mining machines in the form of cloud computing to retail investors who cannot participate due to high thresholds. Individual investors often choose to participate in leading mining pool clusters, as the mining Matthew effect of Filecoin is evident; data from the testnet shows that the output efficiency of the top five mining pools is more than four times that of the sixth to tenth mining pools.

In the trading and circulation of FIL tokens, many exchanges have already launched futures tokens for FIL, collaborating with public investors of FIL to use public shares of FIL as the underlying asset to attract investors to purchase FIL futures. Due to the enormous popularity of Filecoin and the scale of layout funds, exchanges are expected to support FIL after the official launch of the mainnet, approaching the Filecoin ecosystem from both token trading and retail mining pools.

Figure 9: Filecoin Testnet Dashboard, testnet.filecoin

Conclusion

The development of IPFS and Filecoin over the past few years can be described as "half concealing the lute, finally emerging after much calling." On one hand, the storage characteristics of the IPFS network have already gained recognition from the community and users to a considerable extent; IPFS has become the undisputed choice for distributed storage infrastructure in the blockchain world and continues to develop with upward momentum. On the other hand, under the backdrop of massive fundraising for the Filecoin token, the overall project valuation has reached as high as $30 billion, and despite several changes in hardware standards and mining economic models, uncertainties remain. The production and sales of mining machines in the industry are mixed, and many high-fidelity IPFS and Filecoin projects disguise themselves as "blockchain" and "distributed storage mining," shouting slogans of "financial enlightenment" while engaging in fraud. As the saying goes, some are grounded, while others gaze at the stars. It is believed that in the near future, just like the wonderful name of the IPFS InterPlanetary File System, IPFS and Filecoin can truly revolutionize the storage ecology and contribute to the underlying protocols of the human internet.

It is also important to note that the launch time of the Filecoin mainnet has been delayed multiple times, and Protocol Labs has yet to convince the industry that it can activate the mainnet before the end of August. There are still many unclear mechanism issues surrounding the mining economic model of Filecoin that need further clarification, and the performance and liquidity levels of FIL's price may not currently support a healthy operating storage market. Against this backdrop, users interested in IPFS and Filecoin, including investors, should adopt a cautiously optimistic attitude, closely monitor the project's technological and ecological progress, and avoid falling into speculative frenzy.

References

1. "HashKey: Understanding the Economic Model and Miner Economic Behavior of the Popular Project Filecoin," Hashkey Capital Research https://www.chainnews.com/articles/974219932958.htm

2. http://ipfs.cn/

3. IPFS White Paper, https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

4. Filecoin Primer https://coinlist.co/assets/index/filecoin_index/Filecoin-Primer-c74e73db1d65598ca171397df9d219de6b7a7ef80a4886bb152c01883aea7e79.pdf

5. http://ipfs.cn/news/info-100886.html