Filecoin storage
After my first article about Filecoin Foundation where I talked about an overview of the project and the Blockchain, I have decided to continue digging into this. Now I will comment here about the Storage Model, Storage Market and Retrieval Market.
To explain how storage works in Filecoin, it has 3 components:
Providers: their goal is to provide a service to the users on the network. There are 2 types
- Storage Providers: Known as SPs, they are responsible for storing customer information and providing cryptographic proofs that validate the storage.
- Retrieval providers: Known as RPs, they are responsible for providing users with quick access to data.
The difference between these two is that SPs are in charge of long-term storage while RPs are in charge of providing fast access to data.
Offerings: RPs and SPs provide this service to users through an agreement on the Filecoin network. This will depend on the size needed, storage duration, and other aspects. The whole process to carry out the business is outside the chain and once it is agreed, it is added to the chain. Basically, it has 4 steps
- Discovery: the person who wants the storage looks at the possible SPs and asks for pricing.
- Negotiation: When the client decides who, they define price and duration.
- Publication: Once the deal is done, they go on to make it public on the blockchain.
- Execution: The deal is added to the sector where the storage of the information will be tested by the SP.
Sectors: these are the basic storage units where SPs store customer data and generate PoSt.
Filecoin Plus
It has the mission to attract more data to the Filecoin network by offering customers cheap and even free storage. This mechanism was designed around Datacap, by this way a Datacap token will be assigned to verified clients that will bring a 10X multiplier that makes reference to the storage capacity they previously contracted and thanks to this SPs receive verified Deals with a 10x maximization to their storage that increases the block rewards as incentives.
Verified customers can incorporate data into Filecoin using Datacap, which they apply from notaries selected by the community. Notaries govern this program by verifying customer storage and allocating Datacap tokens to verified customers.
Storage on-ramps
Allow you to easily integrate Filecoin storage as well as IPFS into your application or Smart contracts. All this is achieved through APIs that make the deal flow simpler. Some of these are::
Another important term is the Recovery Market which refers to the ability of the data warehouse to return the data to the client once it is requested. In this arrangement, the requestor pays an amount in FIL to the warehouser for the retrieval of information.
Clients must provide information to the SPs for this retrieval, among which it requests:
- SP ID: ID of the SP where the data is stored.
- Payload CID: Also known as Data CID
- Address: The address used to create this agreement
https://saturn.tech/ is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) that allows retrieving this data from the market with low latency and cost.
To summarize, I consider important the following points:
- Filecoin connects storage providers with users looking for another alternative to those already known (AWS, GCP, AZURE). All this allows the user to have a greater choice of price and options as well as little centralization of data.
- There are alternatives already developed on Filecoin that facilitate the process of being an SP or Client, which solves the technical learning that this may require at some point.
- The consumption of data (recovery) is something that in those that exist today, becomes very expensive. Here the amount is determined and previously reviewed by both parties.
Remember that this information is what I was understanding of the detail that is in https://docs.filecoin.io/.
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