Source: Filecoin Network

As we wave goodbye to 2023, we should seriously consider the transformation process that the Filecoin ecosystem has gone through. In this year full of global changes and challenges, the Filecoin community has persevered and worked together towards our common goal: to establish the largest decentralized storage network, load and protect human data, introduce computation to data, and achieve network-scale applications. In this article, you will learn about the continuous contributions of the ecosystem and community updates during this year of network transformation, as well as the outlook for Filecoin's development prospects in 2024. If you are interested in the developments and technological achievements since 2023, please refer to the first part of this article series.

Filecoin Community Development

FIL Events

In 2023, the global Filecoin community witnessed a series of exciting events, including both community-led activities and events organized by the Filecoin Foundation (referred to as "FF"), bringing together enthusiasts, developers, and stakeholders from around the world.

Community-led FIL events such as FIL Jakarta, FIL Seoul, and FIL Bangalore provided participants with dynamic platforms for in-depth discussions, practical workshops, and exchange opportunities, promoting cooperation and knowledge sharing awareness.

FF-organized events like FIL Paris, FIL Vegas, and FIL HongKong offered meticulously planned experiences, including expert lectures, project demonstrations, and in-depth research on the latest developments in the Filecoin ecosystem. These strategically organized events worldwide focused on strengthening communication, driving innovation, and promoting widespread adoption of Filecoin. Overall, these FIL events showcased the global influence and collaborative spirit of the Filecoin community. Whether initiated by enthusiastic community members or carefully planned by the Filecoin Foundation, these events have been instrumental in telling stories, fostering relationships, and propelling the Filecoin ecosystem to new heights in 2023.

FIL Dev Summit

The inaugural FIL Dev Summit held in Singapore and Iceland brought together developers, builders, and community members to discuss how to improve the core Filecoin protocol and network evolution (similar to the IPFS Thing event but on a larger scale).

These summits sparked meaningful and influential conversations, ranging from protocol scalability and network improvements to the intricate data loading and governance structures, continuously driving the positive growth of the Filecoin network. Over the course of 6 days, more than 200 developers, researchers, and community members gathered to share and refine improvement measures, gain insights from different perspectives, challenge assumptions, and collectively find innovative solutions to the challenges facing the Filecoin ecosystem. For more information, please refer to the following summit reviews:

• FIL Dev Iceland Summit Recap: Scaling Enterprise Data from Click to PiB

• Recalling FIL Dev Iceland Summit

• [2023 FIL Dev Singapore Summit Recap Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=JtG 08 g_Thdc)

Filecoin Orbit

In 2023, the Filecoin Orbit project nurtured thousands of builders globally, playing a crucial role in cultivating the Filecoin ecosystem. The project, driven by 147 Orbit ambassadors, hosted 190 workshops and community hackathons in 40 countries, introducing approximately 10,000 early career developers, students, and enthusiasts to the Filecoin ecosystem. The global impact of this project has expanded to cities such as Austin, Mumbai, and Seoul, with a focus on underrepresented regions. As an entry point for the Filecoin Builders Funnel, Orbit facilitated the transition of projects to early-stage startups. Before the launch of FVM, Orbit ambassadors organized over 30 FVM workshops and 10 hackathons, leading to the deployment of 150 new projects on the Filecoin, IPFS, or FVM testnets and mainnets. Additionally, Orbit expanded its influence to top global universities and hosted large conferences in Jakarta, Seoul, and Cape Town, attracting hundreds of developers and storage providers. The program will continue to thrive, with upcoming events planned globally, and enthusiasts are encouraged to actively participate in these free and open events.

Are you interested in becoming an ambassador for Orbit? Submit your application here.

Filecoin Insights (Filecoin TL;DR)

Filecoin TL;DR has played a crucial role in disseminating information and promoting community engagement. Since its launch in February 2023, filecointldr.io has become a central hub for over 430,000 visitors who have viewed 1.9 million pages. The platform's comprehensive guides cover topics such as using FIL in FVM and comparing staking/lending protocols, and its collaborative marketing strategy has generated 3800 impressive backlinks. This strategic approach has positioned the TL;DR team's information prominently in search rankings for key user queries such as "Filecoin staking" and "how to buy Filecoin." The recently established Filecoin TL;DR blog further enriches the ecosystem with 14 articles, including research analyses and practical operational guides.

On social media, the @Filecoin X (formerly Twitter) account has seen significant growth. From January 1 to December 31, 2023, the community followers increased from 256,000 to 667,000, a staggering 160% increase, surpassing any tracked L1/L2 competitive protocol pages. The platform's community engagement is also noteworthy, with its 890 unique brand posts generating 1.9 million interactions, averaging thousands of interactions per post. Filecoin's net sentiment score is 7.31, ranking in the top three among the ten measured L1/L2 protocols.

Simultaneously, the creation of @FilecoinTLDR has provided a centralized channel for token holders and web3 enthusiasts to communicate. The channel's followers quickly grew to 9,800, and its 476 unique brand posts garnered 572,000 community engagements. Notably, FilecoinTLDR continues to support the ecosystem's development through the "Ecosystem Spotlight" initiative. As a cornerstone of the TL;DR ecosystem, it is dedicated to increasing visibility, disseminating information, and actively contributing to the thriving Filecoin community.

PL Creators

The Protocol Labs Builders Funnel provides free builder planning, from education to investment, including promotional activities, university events, hackathons, bounties, accelerator programs, and early-stage investments. In 2023, the Funnel continued to expand its support for builders and startups in the Filecoin ecosystem, laying the groundwork for FVM's growth. By the end of 2023, the Builders Funnel had supported:

• Over 63,000 hackers and over 40 partners in hosting 120+ hackathons, with over 4,500 submissions and over $1.6 million in prizes.

• A total of 602 bounty recipients, including open bounties, targeted bounties, RFPs, joint bounties, and microgrants.

• 316 teams joining or graduating from one of PL's 36 accelerators, which have collectively operated with 23 leading technical partners.

• Accelerator teams raising over $420 million in venture capital.

• Early-stage capital injected into over 100 startups with MVPs and early PMF.

Looking ahead to 2024, the Builders Funnel will continue to support the development of early-stage teams and become the source of venture capital for startups in the Filecoin ecosystem.

Filecoin Building Blocks

Within the complex framework of Filecoin, the fundamental building blocks serve as a solid foundation, strengthening the network's infrastructure and driving it towards enhanced decentralization, increased security, and continuous innovation. These key components include IPFS, libp2p, and drand, each playing a role in shaping the network's foundation.

IPFS & libp2p

In the fields of IPFS and libp2p, 2023 was a year of significant progress, milestones, and high community engagement. Since 2022, IPFS has continued to fulfill its mission of implementing peer-to-peer networking and has made significant progress. Introducing the probelab.io observatory and releasing a Java fast IPFS implementation called Nabu and the composable lightweight alternative to js-IPFS, Helia, all demonstrate the platform's commitment to innovation. IPFS has gained wider adoption, with Brave expanding support for IPFS in its privacy-first browser and integrating IPFS functionality into the widely used curl tool. These efforts were showcased at the IPFS Thing 2023 event in Brussels, where the IPFS implementer community gathered for five days of discussions, talks, and demonstrations to showcase the latest developments and plan for the future.

Looking ahead to 2024, the IPFS roadmap includes establishing the new Interplanetary Foundation, further improving the resilience and decentralization of network applications and dApps, and supporting greater block compatibility for existing content-addressed data.

Meanwhile, as part of the web3 networking stack, libp2p has also made significant progress since 2022. With the release of the libp2p Foundation, core funds, independent engineering teams, the release of [js-libp2p 1.0](https://blog.lib p2p.io/2023-12-12-js-lib p2p/), and experimental support for [http-p2p](https://blog.lib p2p.io/2023-09-20-http-p2p/), the stack has solidified its position as a cornerstone of decentralized protocols. The community continues to grow, with over 321,000 independent libp2p nodes per month, and the libp2p Day 2023 event brought together eight community speakers to share insights.

In 2024, the libp2p roadmap aims to further establish the foundation, adjust funding and structure, address major open issues for robust browser connections, and prioritize the activation of the community and contributors. As IPFS and libp2p continue to shape decentralized networks, we encourage community members, enthusiasts, and developers to explore these advancements, engage in discussions, and contribute to ongoing development.

Drand

This year has been very busy for the drand team and the League of Entropy! Over the past 12 months, as expected, our drand nodes have serviced over 600 billion (600,000,000,000!) randomness requests, maintaining 100% uptime as a distributed threshold network. Through 15 distributed key generation and resharing ceremonies, the League of Entropy has evolved from running a "default" beacon chain on its testnet and mainnet to running two beacon chains at different frequencies (30s and 3s) on two networks. The League of Entropy has also increased from 17 partners to the current 21 partners, with more organizations joining to provide free, fair, and verifiable public randomness for anyone to use.

At the same time, the drand team has participated in 9 different events and organized 2 summits, continuing efforts to promote drand-related information, provide the best DevEx when used, and educate smart contract developers on the importance of using proper, unbiased, and unpredictable randomness on-chain.

We are also building new applications using drand on all networks currently supported by drand, from Filecoin to Sui to Cosmos (via the Nois network). The team is busy introducing the BLS precompiles to FVM and EVM, reducing gas costs for verification on the Filecoin and Ethereum chains. Stay tuned for more Ethereum-related news in 2024! For updates on the project, please check the drand blog or the @drand_loe Twitter account. If you need to use drand in your codebase urgently, please check the drand Github repos.

Filecoin Roadmap - Outlook for 2024

2024 feels more like spring, and Filecoin is set to experience a huge growth trajectory! Here are four exciting breakthroughs that Filecoin will achieve in 2024:

1. New High-Value Applications and Computing L2 Based on Filecoin

With the Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) entering the Filecoin mainnet in 2024, we will see the rise of Filecoin L2, especially those built on the massive storage, computing, and infrastructure advantages of Filecoin.

• The first Filecoin L2 computing network is expected to enter the mainnet (such as Fluence and Lilypad), the first Filecoin-driven Lambda network (Filecoin Station), the first retrieval market (Filecoin Saturn), and more!
• With the surge in generative AI and computing networks dedicated to AI inference and training, we expect to see more specialized computing networks leveraging Filecoin data storage and FVM and IPC building blocks.
• All these L2 networks will bring back more utility, storage usage, collateral demand, and transaction volume to the Filecoin mainnet.
• The design of IPC subnets is highly interoperable, so each new subnet will bring new features and superpowers to the entire Filecoin network, as well as build their own communities, tokens, and applications on Filecoin L1.
• These L2 networks will also leverage new breakthrough features in FVM, such as custom WASM actors and new runtimes to drive new high-quality games, computing systems, and more.

2. Filecoin as the Foundational Storage Layer for web3

In 2023, Filecoin's data storage has seen massive growth, totaling over 1.8 EiB from thousands of independent user ends! In 2024, we will see Filecoin become an even more essential part of web3—from being the storage layer for all blockchain states to DePIN network infrastructure data to smart contract data.

• With the surge in rollups, DA layers, and more, the total chain state of web3 is exploding. By 2024, we expect to see more blockchains and DePIN networks following in the footsteps of Solana, storing their complete archival chain states in Filecoin for cheaper, more verifiable long-term storage, making it easier for dapps, smart contracts, and node operators to access.
• The Filecoin Virtual Machine introduced last year unlocked new programmable storage tools, such as automatic storage and repair contracts. By adding IPC and fast finality unlocking seamless bridging and cross-chain interoperability, we will see new L2 data aggregation networks go live to automate and scale Filecoin data loading, making it easier and faster for any web3 developer or project to store data on Filecoin.
• With these building blocks, more paid data loading tools will emerge, focusing on aggregation services, data availability services, and L1 blockchains with more efficient, decentralized, and on-chain native state storage.
• The overall growth of chain states in the next cycle will drive more applications to choose low-cost, decentralized storage on Filecoin as their state archival solution (currently dominated by Infura, Alchemy, and some particularly centralized AWS with a market of $791.52 billion).
• This will integrate Filecoin more closely with many other blockchain ecosystems (such as Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, etc.) so that any web3 developer can retrieve historical data on Filecoin for analysis, applications, and more.
• DePIN networks will also use Filecoin to ensure their critical infrastructure data, such as local weather conditions, city maps, or WiFi routers, integrates well with on-chain data and states. Tableland has partnered with WeatherXM and is leading in this area!

3. Filecoin for Fast Retrieval of Hot Data

More high-performance applications and paid storage clients will drive the need for fast and reliable retrieval of data stored in Filecoin. In 2023, Filecoin built tools (boost + IPNI + FilPlus reputation) and measurement systems (SPARK + Station) for large-scale retrieval incentives. In 2024, we will see reliable retrieval become the standard for Filecoin storage end-users, enhancing Filecoin's usability and scope.

• The SPARK retrieval monitoring system was launched in November 2023 and has been collecting decentralized metrics about the retrievability of Filecoin data on a large scale through the Station network. By 2024, we will see these retrieval metrics integrated into the Filecoin+ datacap approval and retrieval provider incentive mechanisms through the new Filecoin Plus allocator, completing the retrieval incentive loop. So far, SPARK has completed over 660 million retrievals.

• Projects such as Tableland, web3.storage, and Banyan have been building popular storage products on Filecoin, allowing use cases similar to s3 to be deployed on the Filecoin network! These new layers allow Filecoin to replace more parts of the infrastructure stack as an ecosystem.

4. Continued Growth of DeFi on Filecoin

The uniqueness of Filecoin lies in incorporating core economic traffic as part of its economy. In 2023, there was a significant increase in demand for collateral on Filecoin through protocols like GLIF and StFIL. We expect new use cases to emerge as builders begin to leverage FVM to pull more capital on-chain (e.g., for storage deals, computing services, retrieval work, and payment transactions).

Summary

Looking back at 2023, Filecoin underwent a transformative journey from a decentralized storage network to a programmable open data service platform. Throughout the year, events such as FILJakarta, FIL Dev Summit, and initiatives like Filecoin Orbit and TL;DR platform played a crucial role in community engagement, witnessing significant community growth and technological advancements.

Looking ahead to 2024, Filecoin will further innovate the decentralized network through new applications and computing L2, focusing on becoming the fundamental storage layer for web3. Filecoin will integrate with various blockchain ecosystems and enhance data retrieval, continuing its growth momentum and playing a key role in shaping a more open and interconnected digital world.

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