In the first quarter of 2024, the storage market of Filecoin showed a strong growth momentum. In this quarter, the volume of active transactions increased by 9% month-on-month, indicating that the market demand for Filecoin storage services is rising. At the same time, the storage utilization rate has also increased from 18% in the previous quarter to 23%, which means that the storage space of Filecoin has been used more effectively.

What is exciting is that although the storage capacity has decreased by 14% month-on-month, more than 2,000 customers have chosen to load data on Filecoin. What’s more, 508 of them uploaded large data sets, all of which exceeded 1,000 TiB (which is equivalent to the data of millions of high-definition movies), an increase of 9% over the previous quarter.

Since the introduction of Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) in the first quarter of 2023, the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) ecosystem has been developing vigorously. In the first quarter of 2024, we ushered in new DeFi projects such as Pyth and Uniswap V3(Oku.trade), which further enriched FVM’s ecosystem. At the same time, deposits on GLIF increased by more than 2 times month-on-month, showing the market’s trust and enthusiasm for FVM.

By March 31st, 2024, more than 3,400 unique contracts had been deployed on FVM, an increase of 26% over the previous quarter. This means that more and more developers choose to build their decentralized applications on FVM. At the same time, the total locked-in value (TVL) on FVM also exceeded 600 million US dollars, an increase of nearly 2 times from the previous month. This growth is mainly driven by mobile pledge activities, which further proves the strength and potential of Filecoin in the field of DeFi.

In addition to developing the FVM ecosystem, Filecoin is also committed to improving the adoption rate of enterprises and establishing cooperative relationships with partners such as DePIN to make use of idle computing resources. Through these efforts, Filecoin will continue to promote the development of the blockchain storage market and provide enterprises and individuals with more efficient and safer storage solutions.primer

Filecoin is not only a storage service, it is building a brand-new hardware market, and storage is the first service in this market. You may have heard of IPFS (Interstellar File System), a protocol that makes the data on the Internet more dispersed and reliable. Filecoin is built on top of IPFS, which makes storage more decentralized and secure.

In Filecoin, the price of storage is not fixed, but determined by the market. Just like you buy things in the market, the stored price will change according to the relationship between supply and demand. When you want to store data, you will sign a contract with a service level agreement (SLA) with the storage provider, just like a lease when you rent a house. This contract stipulates the storage period and the fees you need to pay.

In order to ensure the security of your data, Filecoin adopts an encrypted economic incentive model. This means that storage providers need to regularly prove that they do store your data and that it is safe. If they can’t do this, or if they try to attack the network, they will be punished. The way to reward is to use Filecoin’s native token FIL.

When you want to retrieve the stored data, you need to pay the retrieval provider. But unlike storage transactions, retrieval transactions are completed under the chain, which means that you can get data faster without waiting for the transaction on the blockchain to be confirmed.

In addition to storage and retrieval, Filecoin also hopes to provide an open market where you can use contract computing power to run data. It’s like renting a supercomputer to process your data, but it’s more decentralized and safer.

In order to achieve this goal, Filecoin has made some key protocol upgrades, including intelligent contract (Filecoin Virtual Machine–FVM) and extension (Interstellar Consensus). FVM is like an engine of smart contract, which enables Filecoin to support more use cases, such as token leasing, permanent storage and data-intensive computing.In general, Filecoin is building a decentralized storage and computing market to make data more secure, reliable and efficient.