This article is based on a sponsored video series in partnership with Protocol Labs.
A global directory, a social network and peer-to-peer file sharing — these are just a few of over 130 projects that were onboarded onto the decentralized web during HackFS, a recent hackathon organized by Protocol Labs and ETHGlobal.
Running a hackathon is a popular method to onboard developers into new technology and ecosystems. In this instance, the 30-day virtual event laid out the foundations for a decentralized and trustless digital world, or Web 3.0. Meanwhile, the blockchain community awaits the upcoming launch of the Protocol Labs’s Filecoin (FIL) mainnet in mid-to-late September.
Filecoin, the cryptocurrency for the decentralized storage sharing market built on top of Protocol Labs’s peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data, InterPlanetary File Systems (IPFS), aims to be the decentralized means of storage in the Web 3.0 era.
“[Web 3.0] takes the web from being a read-write medium to finally being a trustable medium by adding verifiability,” said Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet during the virtual HackFS kickoff event.
In a traditional model of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), numerous computers interact with a single server to request data. This, and the rising demand for mobile connections have led to slow download speeds and congested servers. IPFS, on the other hand, moves this single-server structure to a peer-to-peer model so data can be received from numerous servers that have the files to serve, which would eliminate the possibility of a “single point of failure.”
The recent virtual 30-day event gathered over 470 hackers from 50 different countries, and kickstarted the development of projects that use decentralized storage, including dApps, games, developer tools and DeFi integrations.
“They’re the future of web3 and they’re identifying problems, working together, finding collaborators, helping make the protocol better and upgrading the whole ecosystem,” said IPFS project lead Molly Mackinlay, who was one of the judges of the finale that saw 10 finalists present their projects to a live and virtual panel.
“Even since the end of the hackathon, we’ve continued to update it and improve on it,” said Steven Dakh, whose project Sailplane, a peer-to-peer file storage service, was named one of the 10 finalists. The finalists earned US$1,000 per team and 250 FIL.
With HackFS coming to a conclusion and Space Race, the ongoing competition to stress-test the Filecoin network, heating on, the ecosystem awaits for the global decentralization of storage nodes in the Web 3.0 era.
“A lot of the structures that we inherited, that were sort of built over time, are maybe not the best infrastructural choices or the best protocol choices that we should have going forward,” said Filecoin product lead Pooja Shah.
Real-time updates and exclusive behind-the-scenes contents from Space Race can be found right here — on Forkast.News.