The vertical domain ecological brand action “ipfs.cn AMA”, launched by the IPFS community of spatiotemporal blockchain, was officially launched. The iPfs.cn AMA is dedicated to the IPFS&Filecoin ecosystem and regularly invites industry participants to discuss the industry’s focus and future landscape. The first AMA will open at 20:00 on July 2nd. Charles Cao Cao, CEO of Filswan, will introduce the original intention of the Filswan project and its impact on the future of Filecoin’s ecological development.
This AMA is divided into fixed Q&A and community Q&A. We will conduct a comprehensive analysis from the customer groups of Filswan, ecological support, guests’ views and other aspects. Thank you very much for the strong support of this activity from Bitcoin, Mars Finance, Golden Finance and Dorahacks.
The following is a review of the AMA:
1. Host NIIC: Let’s first invite Charles Cao to briefly introduce the project of FILSWAN and its main business components. CHARLES CAO: FilSwan is a data order trading and computing platform based on IPFS and Filecoin networks. On the FilSwan platform, you can easily search and find the global storage nodes, issue orders, and the storage provider can also match and receive orders on the platform. FilSwan will provide a one-stop shop from storage to distribution to computing on the IPFS/Filecoin network. 2. Host NIIC: Can you talk about yourself and the background of the Filswan team? CHARLES CAO: Filswan is a team from Canada. I have been deeply involved in cloud computing and blockchain industry since 2017. At present, we have a development team of more than 10 people in Canada, all of whom have a master’s degree or above. The cooperative universities include McGill University and Concordia University in Canada. He has received several research and development grants from the Canadian government and the Natural Science Foundation of Canada on blockchain cloud computing, and is also a member of the Canadian Next Generation Network Excellence Project.
I myself graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Fudan University in 2007 and received my master’s degree in Canada. With more than a decade of experience in R&D and design, he has worked for IBM,SAP, Autodesk and Expedia, etc., and has been fascinated by the future of the combination of cloud computing and blockchain since he first came to cloud computing ten years ago and then came to Ethereum five years ago.
3. Host NIIC: Could you please share the reason why you wanted to do the project Filswan at the beginning? What was the original purpose of its creation? Charles Cao: In 2010, we started experimenting with AWS to provide a variety of commercial services for Autodesk to replace Autodesk’s existing data center services. Since then, we have been very interested in the appeal of flexible computing, pay-as-you-go. 2017 was the year of the outbreak of Ethereum ecology. Filecoin, ICP and other projects completed financing in the same year, and the beginning of the combination of blockchain and cloud computing began to take place.
As Filecoin completes the mainnet launch in 2021, various storage-related APIs are maturing, but there are some areas where the service ecosystem of Filecoin’s network can be strengthened. For example, Filecoin has over 2000 service nodes. Who can provide services, who can provide what services, and where are they? The Filecoin network has a relatively large latency for data fetching. How to fetch data faster? What applications can be added to Filecoin’s storage base? Is it possible to provide computation-related services that bring computing and storage closer together? These are questions that have huge implications for the entire ecosystem of Filecoin. At present, there is no particularly good solution, and Filswan is set up to solve these basic problems.
NIIC: At present, the entire IPFS&Filecoin ecosystem is improving, and recently the largest NFT market, OpenSea, also announced that NFT will be stored on IPFS.
So what do you think of how the IPFS&Filecoin ecosystem has evolved and where it is headed?
Charles Cao: IPFS is a global distributed Web 3 service network with its own distribution and caching, and Filecoin is an incentive layer for permanent storage. The two solutions perfectly solve the problem of storage distribution and incentive. We were lucky to see a large number of ecological projects after the mainnet was launched half a year ago. There’s the FilScan and FilScout team that focus on browser and related services, the Texile team that focus on online save and forward services, the LivePeer team that works with Filecoin Ecology, and a number of teams in various Longhash and Tachyon incubators, They continue to refine and complete the entire storage, computing, and finance ecosystem within Filecoin’s protocol-layer model. Ultimately, the next few years will help Filecoin grow into an ecosystem comparable to Ethereum. NIIC: As you mentioned above, the data retrieval speed on the Filecoin network has some problems such as large delay. What role do you think FilSwan can play in this process? Charles Cao: Filswan is a team that has been working on Filecoin since before the mainnet went live and has been involved with Filecoin since the Space Race. His mission is to improve Filecoin’s capabilities for order delivery, storage, and computation. During Filecoin Mainnet Launch Week, FilSwan was included in Juan’s Mainnet Launch Interview for the Future of Filecoin, where we did some presentations and talks. During Filecoin’s recent Filecoin Plus project we were also invited to participate in a presentation on Filecoin Plus mass order delivery. We obtained two Filecoin Foundation grants for PT level data transfer and S3 data compatible interface. And is a member of the Filecoin Data Build Market.
It’s safe to say that Filecoin is very challenging in three directions: massive data transfer, fast storage distribution, and data computing. As a comprehensive infrastructure platform. The success of FilSwan will greatly reduce enterprise access costs and provide a smooth experience for enterprise users to transition from Web2 to Web3. The FilSwan team is also a member of Notary Public and Minerx in North America and can better coordinate migration between storage providers and enterprise customers.
6. Host NIIC: Who are the main customer groups of the entire Filswan ecosystem? What strategy does the Filswan team plan to pursue to attract new users and retain them for the long term? Charles Cao: FilSwan’s customer base is primarily storage customers and developers of ecological applications. For developers, we provide a series of development application APIs to help them navigate from traditional Web 2 to Web 3 without having to worry about the IPFS/Filecoin storage calls, payment process. For providers of storage requirements, we offer their friendly service discovery, and order bidding, bulk shipping, and bulk import clients.
In North America we provide a number of technical support and user interaction services to help people log on to Filecoin’s network. We’ve also promoted a number of local AI and VR startups into Filecoin’s space, and helped a number of developers win Filecoin Developer Awards. We’re also involved in global events like Dorahack to provide prize pool support to help with the development of ecological applications. In the future, we will provide more development tools and financial support to help enterprises and developers log on to our platform and use our components.
7. Host NIIC: What does Filswan rely on for profit? CHARLES CAO: FilSwan’s profit is generated primarily by the use of the platform. FilSwan offers a variety of free services and support for early-stage eco-businesses. For businesses that reach a certain volume of usage, FilSwan follows the industry’s prevailing pay-as-you-demand model. Users can pay by the amount of storage they use, while some services charge by the amount of data they use. For third-party service subscribers, they also need to pay a part of service revenue commission to the platform to help the development of the platform and better maintain the network. Niic: OK. You mentioned above that Filswan started research and development before the main net was launched and participated in the whole process of Filecoin from the Space Race. As far as I know, Filswan is also the community champion of the Space Race twice, as well as a notary in North America and a member of Minerx twice.
We would also like to share your personal suggestions for the future development of the entire IPFS&Filecoin ecosystem.
Charles Cao: It’s not a good idea. Filecoin, under the leadership of the Protocols Lab and the Foundation, has been scaling up its development and ecological applications to meet its own goals and steps, with remarkable results. From a personal perspective, I can offer a few small suggestions to the eco-participating teams.
First, Filecoin is not a static software protocol, based on my experience with the Foundation and Protocol Lab Americas. Filecoin is constantly evolving at the protocol level, such as smart contracts. Filecoin will have its own smart contract system in the future, which will rival Ethereum’s smart contract system. Teams with eco-application plans can be laid out in advance.
The second is that there is huge scope at the application level. ZX has provided a lot of suggestions on ecological development. If you are interested, you can check out some of his suggestions on ecological development. For example, Defi, Filecoin is still relatively weak. The third is application landing. There are quite a few teams working on network disk related applications, which is a very good direction, but also pay attention to the economic model and profit model. How can Filecoin match the experience of Baidu, which spends a lot of money every year on online drives, and still be cost-effective?
The fourth is laws and regulations. In Filecoin and IPFS applications, we must comply with local laws and regulations.
Community Question Session:
1. Host NIIC: Actually, we have also received several questions from the community before, and I have selected two for your advice: Could you please share the milestones of FilSwan since its inception, as well as the future planning and outlook? Charles Cao:
The first prototype of the computing platform and billing was unveiled during Filecoin mainnet launch week in October 2020. Third party billing software was used at that time.
The bidding module was released for the first time in January 2021. And participated in the first edition of Filecoin’s official community project AMA in 2021, as we were invited to participate in the first edition of IPFS China AMA today.
In March 2021, received the Filecoin Foundation’s PB Award for Data Transfer.
API access will be opened in April 2021. The number of users has increased rapidly. The total number of orders issued has exceeded 20,000, and the storage has exceeded 500TB data.
Official FS3 storage grant was granted in May 2021. Get into industry integration work for FS3.
In June 2021, the company obtained the North American notary position, providing enterprises with 10X computing power real data approval qualification.
In the future, we will successively launch the payment module, calculation module and other important functions, and plan to introduce 100 ecological teams around the world to establish an ecological reward pool.
2. Host NIIC: Could you please share the current financing progress? Charles Cao: Filswan has been favored and invested by heavyweight institutions since its inception. At present, the development of the team has sufficient funds, and institutional investors have given us a lot of advice and help in various aspects. Funding from the Filecoin Foundation’s Dev Grant and Minerx has also played a big role in our development.
NIIC: Thank you very much to Charles Cao for sharing with us today, which allows us to further understand the operation of the entire ecosystem of Filswan. At the same time, Charles Cao’s insights into the ecosystem of IPFS&Filecoin also benefit us a lot.
Filecoin’s ecosystem is evolving, with applications, partner capital, accelerators, developer tools, infrastructure, and research institutions all working together to create a distributed, decentralized network for Web3.0 and mining consulting SLF5576. IPFS&Filecoin solves the problem of data heterotopic storage and transmission through distributed storage technology, and is committed to replacing HTTP and becoming a more secure network transmission protocol. It can be said that this is the most valuable bright spot today.