Robust Verified Storage Analytics with Starboard’s Fil+ Dashboard

The Filcoin plus risk & compliance lead collaborated with Starboard to build a robust analytics platform designed to provide valuable insights about data cap verification and allocation in the Filcoin ecosystem. This article outlines the motivation behind the development of the Fil+ client dashboard and its potential to provide stakeholders with comprehensive analytics, address pain points related to monitoring and governance, and support informed decision-making.

Context and motivation

Under the Fil+ program, storage clients who wish to onboard a dataset onto the network submit to a verification process led by notaries who help to ensure that the data is useful, retrievable, and of high quality. Once approved, clients are given a data cap allocation and the right to work with storage providers to provision storage. Storage providers receive a large boost in block rewards, incentivizing high-quality data in the network. Today, nearly all new storage deals in the Filecoin network proceed through the Fil+ program, and the need for effective governance of data cap allocation is stronger than ever.

The Filecoin blockchain holds a rich amount of data mapping not only relationships between clients, providers, and notaries but also the flow of datacap between these entities. In the interests of securing the long-term health and viability of the Filecoin ecosystem, Starboard is motivated to consider a data-driven approach to improve the governance of data cap allocation and management.

Problem statement

The increasing scale and adoption of the Fil+ program makes it crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of dynamic interactions between clients, notaries and providers. The sheer number of stakeholders makes it difficult to track relationships in datacap flow through traditional tools such as block explorers, necessitating a fresh and tailored approach.

A second issue is that the elevated incentives and economic stakes create strong imperative for malicious actors to game the system by colluding to direct enhanced block rewards to only a few selected providers, or to collect rewards for essentially useless data. There is a clear need for the Filecoin community to effectively identify and weed out parasitic, unproductive and malicious actors in the long term interest of the network.

Hypothesis

We hypothesize that we can leverage concepts in complex network science to extract valuable insights about data cap flow in the network. Using relationship networks as a starting point, we seek to identify transactional motifs, provide decision support for community governance and facilitate exploration and creative inquiry among stakeholders.

Datacap Flow Analysis

The flow of datacap allocation from a notary, to a client, and finally to storage providers is encoded through a network graph as shown above. Each node represents a counterparty and each line represents a transfer of datacap allocation, in the direction denoted by an arrow.

These representations do not only show flow of datacap, but it is also possible to discern finer structure within network graphs. In academic circles, a considerable amount of effort has gone into analyzing subgraphs — that is, subsets of a whole network graph centred around a few nodes that retain the original connectivity. The general idea is to identify recurring subgraphs or motifs that can fingerprint activity such as collusion between one or a group of stakeholders. The procedure of identifying important subgraphs is known as community detection. Motif and community detection need not be done by eye, and there exist mathematical algorithms to calculate in a principled manner.

The Fil+ Dashboard

With these fundamental principles in mind, we introduce the Fil+ Dashboard, a platform aimed at aiding the work of notaries in inspecting the activities and relationship networks of storage clients.

The Fil+ Dashboard provides a quick, searchable list of storage clients in the Fil+ program, facilitating a quick overview into the current state of datacap allocation.

By clicking into one of the clients in the client table, or by directly searching for a client’s short or long-form Filecoin address, notaries arrive at a tearsheet-style view of client activity, which gives a quick overview of their basic information (addresses, onboarding time, names if known), information about deal making (number, size, duration of deals), and so on.

The core feature of the Fil+ Dashboard is Community Data, a quick visual overview of the network relationships of a given storage client. This visualization gives an instant overview into how datacap flows from notaries, to the client, and finally to storage providers. Clicking on each of the network nodes in turn provides full details of datacap flow between stakeholders, the quantum of datacap transfer, timestamps and more. It encourages exploration and creative inquiry of network relationships, allowing users to check for signatures of collusion, preferential treatment, or more.

Finally, in Activities, users obtain a list of the storage client’s raw activities — what are the deals they’ve made, with whom and when? This information will help notaries make better and more informed decisions as they carry out complex investigations regarding a client’s suitability to receive datacap.

Outlook

The Fil+ Dashboard is a powerful tool for analyzing the Fil+ ecosystem, and its capabilities can evolve as the ecosystem matures. In our view, the Dashboard’s potential lies in its ability to enhance decision making processes, eliminate many of the ongoing pain points of monitoring and governance, and promote transparency and trust among all stakeholders in the Fil+ ecosystem.

Starboard is looking forward to adding additional features to our Fil+ dashboard in the future. Here we outline a few possible directions and use cases.

Anomaly scoring. During the creation of the Fil+ dashboard, Starboard has harvested secondary statistics from the network structure that can be used as a foundation for anomaly scoring/detection, unusual or malicious behavior. For example, how broadly has a client distributed data cap to its storage provider partners? Does a client have a particular proclivity for verifiers or storage providers known to behave maliciously? We aim to make these statistics available to the community in the near future.

Data retrievability. One of the most definitive indicators that data onboarded via the Fil+ route is useful is that the data is retrievable on demand. We aim to make retrieval statistics available for all clients to give notaries a glimpse not just into relationship structure, but into the data itself.

Motif and community detection. The rich and complex relationship network structures invite more comprehensive network analysis to unveil loops, cycles, and other motifs of notable or malicious behaviour in the Fil+ ecosystem.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Starboard’s Fil+ dashboard is a simple-to-use yet powerful analytics platform to analyze datacap flow in the Fil+ ecosystem, specially tailored to support the important work of notaries in ensuring high-quality data in the ecosystem, and thus safeguarding the long-term vitality of Filecoin. By leveraging concepts in complex network science we provide valuable insights into transaction patterns and behaviors. We believe that the Fil+ dashboard has the ability to transform monitoring, governance, and decision-making within the ecosystem, facilitating an efficient, pleasant, and transparent community for all stakeholders.