Milestones｜With the Network Storage Power breaks through 10 EiB, the real data storage in leaps and bounds

At 23:43 (UTC+8:00) on August 31, 2021, the Network Storage Power of Filecoin exceeded 10 EiB for the first time, ushering in another exciting milestone.

In this article, we will talk about the current status of the Filecoin network and its real data storage through the data on the Filecoin block explorer.

Current network status: rapid growth

According to data from the block browser Filscan. io, after the Network Storage Power reached 10 EiB, it continued to grow steadily at a power growth which more than 50PiB per day, without any network fluctuations.

On September 1st, the Network Storage Power was 10.06EiB, and the baseline trend was 5.08EiB. The Latest 24h Power Growth was 56.7PiB, and the Network Storage Power was almost twice the baseline trend. Since the Block Height of 634306 in the early morning of April 2nd, the scale of the Network Storage Power has steadily surpassed the baseline for the first time. At that time, the Network Storage Power was 3.81EiB. In five months, the Network Storage Power rose rapidly from 100% of the baseline to nearly 200%, achieving growth of 6.19EiB. At the same time, the time required to increase the power of a single EiB is also gradually decreasing, with an interval of only 18 days from 9EiB to 10EiB.

What is the reason why the Network Storage Power of Filecoin has increased so fast? Take a look at the whole network data index speech!

According to the data indicators of the block browser at 10:48(UTC+8:00), on September 2nd, the Cost of Sealing 32G Sectors is 6.50642 FIL/TiB, and the Cost of Sealing 64G Sectors is 5.84355 FIL/TiB, the number of Active Nodes is 2966.

From the data, it can be felt that the cost of new Network Storage power on the current network has dropped significantly, especially compared with the cost exceeding 10FIL/TiB at the beginning of this year, which is almost half the consumption. The decrease in cost means that the threshold for joining the Filecoin network is lowered, and more new nodes are added to the network, contributing more storage resources. At the same time, the existing nodes in the network will also consider expanding the storage space when the cost is reduced and increasing the Storage power of the nodes as Network Storage power increases, thereby ensuring that the proportion of nodes in the network will not be greatly diluted and obtain stable income.

Two main factors affect the cost of new Network Storage power: sector pledge and Base Fee.

The decline in sector pledge is mainly since the new Network Storage far exceeds the baseline. According to the simple release and baseline release rules in the Filecoin economic model, the winning reward first rises and then falls, while the sector pledge is equivalent to a 20-day block Reward + 30% of FIL circulation supply, which will decrease with the decrease of block reward and circulation.

Regarding the basic fee, after a major upgrade of HyperDrive, nodes can choose the form of message uploading when they increase their power, that is, non-aggregated messages and aggregated messages. Then, to minimize the cost of power growth, storage providers can flexibly use different message types on the chain and choose the solution with the lowest gas fee among the four message types: PreCommitSector, ProveCommitSector, PreCommitSectorBatch, and ProveCommitAggregate.

From the statistical point of view, the basic fee for the past 30 days has been below 1nanoFIL, which fully shows that after the network upgrade, the change to support the aggregation of messages on the chain greatly reduces the pressure on the network. Compared with January this year when the basic fee exceeded 5 nanofilms, the current gas consumption is only about 20% of gas consumption in January.

Real data storage: the future can be expected, but still need to work hard

In the current overall network environment for the storage market, storage providers and their contribution of storage resources are increasing. At this time, it is very suitable for storage applications to start landing attempts and expand outward with the distributed storage market. However, the actual data storage capacity in the current network has not yet reached the expected volume.

According to the statistics of transaction orders stored in the network by the block browser, it is possible to roughly estimate how much real data there is in the current network. There are a total of 2,304,625 transaction records in the network. Assuming that the data store corresponding to each exchange is 32 GiB, the total real data storage is about 70.33 PiB, accounting for 0.68% of the Network Storage power.

Although there are some verification orders, according to the filplus.info dashboard, the current DataCap share allocated to the storage client is only 1.64 PiB, and part of the share is not allocated to the network, so the total effective power of real data will not exceed 80 PiB. The total proportion is still less than 1%.

What are the factors that affect the storage of real data?

When real data is stored, the storage provider needs to send the order information of the storage transaction to the network for message uploading, and the message type is PublishStorageDeals. This kind of news in the 24-hour gas statistics shows that it only accounts for 0.07% of the total number of messages on the entire network. However, the average gas fee burned by each message is as high as 0.077697FIL.

When providing storage services, storage providers send PublishStorageDeals messages more than using junk data to increase power, resulting in additional gas fees. If the storage fee paid by the user cannot cover the additional cost, or there is no data cap to subsidize, it is difficult to mobilize the enthusiasm of the storage provider; but if the user is allowed to bear most of the cost, it is not conducive to the development of the storage market scale in the early stage of the network.

For various reasons, the Filecoin Plus real data verification project is undoubtedly the first choice for the current Filecoin network development stage. Allocating users with real data storage needs can obtain a DataCap quota often the effective power, and take advantage of the verification order in block rewards to attract more storage providers to bring real data into the Filecoin network.

At present, the big data set verification project (for details, please refer to the previous article “FIL+｜Apply for 500 TiB DataCap at a time? The big data set verification project is in progress!”) is continuing to advance. In the next three months, we hope to see the amount of real data storage in the network quickly exceeded 100 PiB and continued to grow. I believe that with the help of more DataCap resources, real data storage can usher in the next breakthrough point.