Fil+ Quality Phase: End of Month Update — April, 2023
Today marks exactly 1 month since we originally created this blog space and announced the official launch of the Filecoin Plus program’s Quality Phase (announcement post). Since then, we’ve been able to make substantial progress on numerous initiatives, some of which I’d like to highlight below. There’s also been a specific focus on improving visibility into priorities and tracking of key metrics in the Fil+ ecosystem, which has resulted in changes to dashboards, new dashboards, and (work in progress) changes to architecture and tooling to improve transparency. We have a link to a survey at the bottom of this post; please take a minute after reading to provide us with your feedback.
Before we jump into the details, here’s how the Fil+ ecosystem has grown over the last month:
- Total data stored in verified deals up ~110 PiBs (average of 3.67 PiB/d)
- Unique client addresses that have ever received DataCap is up 130 (2442 total)
- Unique SP IDs serving any verified deals in the past is up up 120 (1634 total)
In the month of April, we made a big push towards improving visibility, transparency, and alignment. As a reminder, here are some of the latest scope definitions:
Vision: Fil+ scales utilization of the Filecoin network to store humanity’s information.
Mission: Incentivize data onboarding across use-cases with community governed trust mechanisms.
Target users: The program should support all client actors with quality data engaging in distributed onboarding. To help define and add some examples:
- Client actors can be either data owners or preparers, who provide some form of “Know your Client” (KYC) information to earn social trust or prove long term network alignment
- Quality data is all legal content that: the data owner wants to see on the network; or is open and retrievable; or demonstrates proof of concept or utility of the network, such as efforts to improve onboarding
- Distributed onboarding is generally defined as: multiple physical locations and multiple storage provider entities to serve client requirements
Specific goals: Defining the following goals for the Quality Phase and working towards tracking progress towards them on public dashboards:
- Quality: 95% of new DataCap is allocated to quality data & use cases
- Transparency: Public visibility into all key initiatives and goals
- Enablement: 100% of valid types of clients have a path to getting DataCap
The best place to reference these and see additional details is on the landing page of https://filplus.storage/. Also on this page, you can see the latest progress on key initiatives on the Fil+ roadmap. A more detailed view into the roadmap along with milestones and current DRIs (directly responsible individuals) is available here.
That’s where we are headed, but bringing back the focus to this past month, here are some milestones you should dig into:
Fil+ dashboard updates: Updates to the Fil+ dashboard, details shared in Part 1, Part 2, and more to come. DataCap flow is now tracked via a sankey diagram that shows how the 1.14 EiB of DataCap that has ever been created has been used. The program crossed a major milestone of 1 EiB of DataCap granted to client addresses!
We’re also working towards better estimating the impact of the Fil+ program to the overall ecosystem. Conservative estimates peg the current investment in hardware to support the verified deal footprint on-chain to close to $35MM USD.
Filplus.storage v2: Improvements to the DataCap application UX, a new landing page, and ability to action on proposals like Enabling a ‘complete’ upfront verification process toward a (more) efficient initial allocation approval. This app was also open sourced — here’s the repo.
If you’re a DataCap applicant or looking to get DataCap for the first time, this is the app to use to get started. Even for those of you with applications in flight, the app provides a view into every application opened with your GitHub account in one place, which is helpful for tracking and management over time.
Dispute Resolution: Launch of a public Dispute Tracker, process around it, and an improved Dispute Resolution Framework.
We are seeing approximately 4 disputes being opened each week, signaling that the community is supportive and engaging with the push towards quality by acting as guardians for trust and safety. Of the 14 disputes that have been raised in the last month, 7 were opened in the last week alone and 7 have been resolved with appropriate consequences or follow-up. These include the removal of a notary, updates to documentation, and warnings issued to specific DataCap applicants and notaries. The T&T WG is working on addressing the open disputes and proposing next steps. Join the conversation in #fil-plus-trust-wg to stay up to date on T&T disputes.
Tracking potential abuse in the system today: the T&T WG and governance team has been working with several collaborators in the ecosystem to develop tools and tracking for how DataCap is used and the value derived from it. This in turn leads to better tracking of compliance with “quality” and identification of potential abuse in the system today. Here is the first of many such graphs and views we are working towards. This represents a view into network level aggregation based on analysis from the CID checker tool (source code), which estimates quality of data onboarding based on CID deal distribution.
There’s a lot of exciting things on the horizon in May, we look forward to continued collaboration and partnership to push the program in a positive direction. This includes:
- Notary due diligence tracking
- Tooling to remove DataCap from client addresses
- KYC/KYB integrations in client onboarding LDN flow
- More dashboards and tracking to measure progress and (new) metrics
The Governance team wants to hear from you! We need your feedback to understand what is working and where we need to be focusing our efforts. Our goal is to continue designing and directing this program in the open, driven by our diverse community of stakeholders.
Please take a minute to fill out this survey: https://airtable.com/shrn5ELkgtQwtbY2i
