Filecoin in Building the Metaverse with Web3
“Web3 is going to be fundamental to the creation of the Metaverse.” – Juan Benet
Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, recently presented a keynote on the topic of building the Metaverse, here’s the summary made by LBank Mining.
Building blocks of Metaverse
LIBP2P – a peer-to-peer modular network stack, it underlies IPFS, Filecoin, Ethereum, Polkadot and a lot of other protocols.
LIBP2P is a way in which many nodes in Web3 interact with each other to pass along messages, communicate, find and distribute contents and so on. This is a layer where it can be extremely useful and valuable for many groups to explore building new kinds of protocols and other things.
IPFS – a protocol makes the web peer-to-peer, it is the content and data platform of Web3.
IPFS enables content addressing with CIDs, which are content identifiers that allow hash linking from one piece of content to another, this can make the piece of content verifiable and the distribution of that content secure so that nobody can tamper with the content. IPFS builds a huge and growing ecosystem, there are thousands of applications, millions of websites, excellent dev tools, browsers, DeFi joining in this iPFS ecosystem.
Filecoin – the storage network of Web3, it is a crypto powered storage network structured as a two-sided market where on one side there are clients that want to hire the network to store data and on the other side there are miners that want to store the users’ data.
Storage miners are organized through the block reward, which is a reward for participants that contribute a certain amount of power to the network, and that power is measured in terms of the amount of storage capacity that miners provide.
Filecoin launched less than a year ago, and it already has more than 8EiB of network total storage power, which is able to store a huge amount of data, there are lots of organizations building on top of the Filecoin network, thousands of active miners and GitHub contributors and so on. Filecoin network is growing at a rate about 60PiB per day, that’s about the size of a full internet archive being added to the network daily.
The amount of current Filecoin storage deals is about 17PiB, this is a lot less than the network’s total capacity, so there’s not that much data to store in Web3 right now, this means that Filecoin has saturated all of what there is to store in Web3. Protocol Labs wants to help lots of different groups get started in moving Web2 applications into Web3 or start building new Web3 applications.
Some examples of the applications that people are building on top of Filecoin include user drives like Dropbox, social network type applications, video networks and so on.
NFT.Storage – a website that makes it easy for users to backup their NFTs to IPFS, Pinata and Filecoin.
NFT.Storage just launched a few months ago, but it has already stored most of the NFTs that exist – about 1.5 million NFTs and most of them are coming from Ethereum. All these NFTs are addressed by their CIDs, and all of the NFT storage is provided free by the Filecoin crypto economics. NFT.Storage currently has a limit of about 32GB per NFT, that’s a huge amount of storage per NFT so this even allows a full game or video to be uploaded and stored as NFTs.
How the Metaverse will grow
There is a possibility that one large company might create a large-scale platform with a lot of different components and so on, this sort of build a Metaverse. But in Juan’s opinion, this would be a pretty bad outcome, if these large companies end up controlling such a huge swath of the Metaverse, it’ll lead to a pretty bad world where they get to control most of the interactions of users on the planet.
What’s more likely to happen is that the Metaverse will start in pieces and will get wired up together. Metaverse is already here and it’s in the shape of things that we built for many years and in the shape of NFTs that people are minting and trading now. Users that hold a lot of these NFTs and invested lots of their time into creating game worlds are going to want those creations to live on and to be able to transfer over to new environments. NFT market might end up creating the reason by which the Metaverse becomes an open platform, cause parties will want their NFTs to continue to be useful and valuable in a whole range of applications, which won’t mesh that well with singular platform.
Juan believes that the value of art often comes from the experience of the art, NFT museums and NFT galleries create a digital analog of that experience in a high quality way, this will be an extremely useful and valuable component in helping us explore the Metaverse. If we can create some rooms where we can place some of these NFT arts and we can explore it and experience it together, then we can start having meaningful experiences in virtual worlds, over time it will lead to an evolution of an exploration of different kinds of spaces, different kinds of environments, different kinds of rooms and over time these might end up getting stitched together.
Metaverse build ideas
First and foremost, there’s a ton of incredibly valuable and useful data on the web that could be used in a Metaverse, so there are lots of open access data sets which just need to be wired up to Web3 applications. The first thing somebody might be able to do is to just pull in a lot of these kinds of data sets into Filecoin, such as building Web3 photo and video archives and so on.
You can also think some of the game worlds in the same way, there are lots of people around the world have spent huge amount of their time crafting amazingly beautiful worlds, those people would very much like to be able to use these worlds in other environments, having some kind of equivalent of the social media data export type structure that enables people to port their Minecraft worlds into Web3 might be super interesting and valuable. Furthermore, storing open source game content in Web3 would also be really useful.
If you are a developer who likes writing tooling for other developers, it would be very useful and helpful for creating Metaverse to build infrastructures such as SDKs, libraries, simplified tools and so on.
It would be amazing to see a product that allows people to create a room and compose the things that are in that room by referencing other NFTs, then take that room and craft it and mint it as an NFT itself so people are able to use these rooms and later visit them and invite other people to go and spend time in them, this will provide some kind of multiplayer experiences. These rooms can also be composed and connected to other rooms and build a larger buildings together and so on.
There are other ideas such as crypto native video platforms, open access music, video NFTs, crypto-vine, pay-per-view media, personalized spaces, museums and galleries.
Building the Metaverse yourself
At the end of the day, the future is very much up to you, the course of technology in human history shows that it’s usually the groups of people that build things and create the components and so on that end up deciding how components should behave, which makes principles and policies that eventually affecting everybody, it’s really important that you get involved in shaping and crafting the future of this technology so that the Metaverse created will appeal to you and to many other people in the world. The decisions of how this should be shaped are not just up to a small group of people. The whole Metaverse will come closer and will be realized sooner with your help.
Good luck in building the Metaverse.
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