Welcome to the third part of my journey aiming to shed some light on the decentralization space. After exploring Dfinity and Akash in my earlier posts, we’re now taking a closer look at Filecoin and their solutions to learn about our similarities and differences.
About Filecoin
Filecoin is a global decentralized storage network & marketplace, founded in 2014 and based on the peer-to-peer storage protocol IPFS. The open-source project is one of the most popular providers of decentralized storage, storing files reliably on the Internet. Like IPFS, it was founded by Protocol Labs.
How Filecoin compares to ThreeFold
- Filecoin offers a peer-to-peer cloud storage network & marketplace, ThreeFold provides the most advanced distributed peer-to-peer network as well as an energy-efficient full stack cloud infrastructure, uniting compute, storage & network
- IPFS does not provide a privacy layer, so “all traffic on IPFS is public”, whereas at ThreeFold, we’re determined to empower users & to provide an entirely secure IT ecosystem with solutions like our 3Bot, QSFS & more
- While Filecoin also has its own underlying blockchain, we’re the first full-stack blockchain-enabled cloud to be made open source
- Filecoin’s nodes are actually IPFS nodes & their most advanced implementation is based on Lotus, the Filecoin Node Client. Our 3Nodes allow even people without technical skills to participate by downloading our stateless, lightweight Zero-OS. Thanks to our autonomous & self-healing technology, no maintenance is required
- On Filecoin’s market, people can only participate if their nodes are built specifically for their platform, they even issued a warning in their documentation about that
- While Filecoin doesn’t seem to offer any kind of certified hardware, we’re offering plug-and-play 3Nodes with our certified hardware partners
- At ThreeFold, we’ve built our own operating system from scratch, starting just with a Linux kernel, whereas Filecoin doesn’t have its own OS
- Filecoin’s token FIL & our ThreeFold Token (TFT) are both utility tokens that fuel an open-source cloud
- With Filecoin, the more storage a miner adds, the more FIL the respective miner will be rewarded with. However, Filecoin miners must stake their FIL & can even lose their stake if their node doesn’t perform, whereas our farming doesn’t require staking. Our ThreeFold Tokens (TFT) can represent either a unit of compute, storage or network on ThreeFold Grid & our farmers are rewarded for connecting any of these capacity types to our Grid
- In Filecoin’s model, mining means contributing storage capacity to be leased by users on the marketplace that are looking to store their data. ThreeFold’s farming is the concept of expanding the Internet with more network, compute or storage capacity, as ThreeFold Farmers are our more sustainable equivalent of the miners of other cryptocurrencies
To conclude, the two projects share the same vision of bringing users’ data closer to their respective owners, establishing an open cloud market that is independent from the few big centralized cloud providers currently dominating the market. Nevertheless, Filecoin is focused on storage and mainly based on the IPFS protocol, only providing an incentive layer on top. In contrast, ThreeFold provides all three major low-level components of the Internet’s backbone: compute, storage and network. Additionally, ThreeFold’s P2P Cloud offers a holistic set of solutions, making ThreeFold the ideal substrate for projects like Filecoin to run on (we’re also IPFS-compatible). So, we believe Filecoin and ThreeFold could team up to jointly drive the decentralization of the Internet and cloud as, in our opinion, collaboration enables all of us to effect change at a large scale. Thanks for continuing this journey with me and don’t forget to stay tuned for the next stop: Storj!
For a more detailed comparison of Dfinity, Akash, and Filecoin with ThreeFold, check out our blog. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!
