Outlier Ventures CEO and Founder Jamie Burke and Protocol Lab Ecosystem Lead Colin Evran talk about the future business opportunity of Web3 decentralized storage and the role played by Outlier Ventures' recently announced Filecoin Base Camp.
Outlier Ventures and Protocol Lab are collaborating to realize the multi-year development vision of the Web3 ecosystem through the perspective of distributed storage. The work began with the Filecoin Base Camp accelerator, a three-month program at Outlier Ventures to incubate and grow early-stage projects at the concept stage.
1. Data services of Web2 and Web3
"Filecoin is a movement to create a decentralized, efficient and robust foundation for human information." - Colin Evran
This vision brings with it a huge business opportunity. In the next four years, the amount of data generated globally will triple to approximately 175ZB. Today's data storage infrastructure can only maintain 5% of future data.
Today's data storage industry is not only hampered by storage capacity, but also unable to meet the demands of a robust network in the digital age:
-
Centralization: Three major companies control the vast majority of cloud storage.
-
Data Control: Users have no control over the data they store.
-
Verifiability: The growing problem of fake news and data integrity means that people are less and less able to trust the information they read online.
Ecosystems such as Filecoin, IPFS, and Ethereum have solutions to all of these problems, but the ultimate realization depends on the applications and businesses that people build on these protocols. Programs like Outlier Ventures’ Filecoin Base Camp accelerator are critical to mobilizing existing funding to source, nurture, and launch these businesses.
2. Data economy
Today, the data network economy is not working optimally. Too few companies operate as unchallenged monopolies, get too much value, and have even more unused data. The potential of data has not been tapped, which is the result of the world's data economy not being open.
Think of Filecoin as the Airbnb of cloud storage. Currently, new data centers and solutions looking to grow cannot compete with the companies currently dominating cloud storage. Just as Airbnb allows individuals to compete with Marriott hotels around the world, Filecoin allows individuals, small businesses, and new businesses to compete with the world's data monopolies by using their underlying storage space.
Fundamentally, this changes the paradigm of the global data storage industry. Businesses can now offer differentiated services to compete with each other and with industry veterans, creating an economy where prices are priced by the market rather than the business, the team.
3. Web3 Data Storage Use Cases
"If you haven't figured out how to store data, you don't qualify as a Web3 startup." - Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures
Filecoin and IPFS are general platforms with a wide range of use cases:
-
Consumer use cases: Dropbox-style platforms such as Slate, Space, and ChainSafe Files.
-
NFT storage: Opensea, Curio, Mintgate, and Flame all use nft.storage.
-
Data marketplaces: Projects like Wolfram Alpha, Ocean, and Filehive.
-
Video: The platform is using Livepeer and VideoCoin to transcode, store and retrieve video files.
-
Audio: On top of the Web3 stack, Audius offers Spotify-like functionality.
-
Others: decentralized identity, search marketplaces, DeFi and finance, browsers like Brave and Opera, and verifiable storage platforms like Starling.
Driving all these use cases forward is a remarkable ecosystem of developers. Through hackathons, the FIlecoin ecosystem has witnessed the participation of 10,000 developers in the past two months alone. Grant programs are funding thousands of companies.
And accelerators like Filecoin Base Camp, and mentors like Outlier Ventures, play a vital role in helping companies bring their ideas to life. All of this is backed by substantial funding, with $50 million earmarked by VCs for the Filecoin ecosystem.
4. Data financialization and computing
Data financialization:
For most companies, data is a cost (how can they store it economically) and a liability (protecting customer and user data is impossible). Through the financialization of data, the relationship between business and data can be flipped: user data sets can be opted in, licensed and collateralized, and used to create entirely new revenue streams.
Technologies like IPFS and Filecoin present the opportunity to turn data storage from a service into a commodity like oil. Currently, data storage pricing is controlled as a service. If data storage turns into a commodity - the market sets the price and creates various parameters, derivatives and instruments for a group of people to store data in that commodity, then this changes the paradigm from a controlled industry to a decentralized one industry.
calculate
Today, the primary way data is consumed is in a computing environment. Therefore, a complete decentralized cloud must have both storage and computing functions. The computing power of the Filecoin stack comes from modularity. Individual cloud providers on the Filecoin network can specialize in specific services (such as video transcoding, big data genomics, machine learning, etc.).
The ecosystem is not a "one size fits all" storage solution, but different layers of the stack can be combined into desired storage services.