There have been recent rumors about Filecoin potentially canceling DC packaging. Let’s delve into the situation to understand what’s going on.
The rumors mainly point out the shortcomings of the current DC design, which restricts industry and transactional development and creates an imbalance between large and small storage providers (SPs). Additionally, some struggling Content Carrier (CC) nodes may leave the network and have a negative impact on decentralization. To address these issues, the community has proposed either canceling FIL+ (DC nodes with 10x computational power) or migrating them to Layer 2 (FVM), while preserving a pure CC storage mode on Layer 1 (L1).
First, let’s review the three stages of Filecoin’s development:
- Garbage Data Storage (CC Sectors) Stage: During this stage, various service providers globally actively joined the network, rapidly providing large-scale storage space, and making the Filecoin network gain initial scale. In this stage, the content of the data does not require high quality, so many service providers directly packaged garbage data or purely binary code.
- Real Data Development Stage: Currently, Filecoin is in this stage, with the network’s storage capacity exceeding 12EB. To introduce real data (DC Sectors) and improve retrieval capabilities, Filecoin introduced the FIL+ mechanism. Through FIL+, verified nodes approved by the Filecoin team can obtain DC capacity and package DC nodes, which by default have 10x computational power, saving 90% of hardware costs.
- Large-Scale Application Building Stage: This stage will still take some time to achieve.
Although the initial intention of introducing FIL+ was to incentivize the introduction of real data, it gradually became less fair due to profit-driven motives. Many service providers sell DC capacity on the market, and the data packaged in these DC nodes often consists of large-sized videos or images, which may not be genuinely commercially viable but are relatively improved compared to garbage data.
Due to the sustained low FIL price, the rapid dilution of DC capacity has made it almost unprofitable or even loss-making for CC providers. This has caused strong dissatisfaction among small-scale providers.
However, despite the legitimate grievances of CC providers, it is highly unlikely for DC to revert to the CC stage because it goes against the fundamental logic. The Filecoin network inevitably needs to introduce real data to provide the infrastructure for large-scale application building. The goal of the Filecoin network is not just mining. During the development of DC, various issues are bound to be encountered but can be gradually optimized. DC will not retreat to CC; instead, CC sectors will gradually be replaced by DC. However, this process requires coordination of the interests of all service providers.
As for some CC nodes exiting the network due to lack of profitability, it is a normal phenomenon. In the development of Bitcoin and Ethereum, many small-scale miners also exited, but the networks were not significantly affected.
Filecoin is an L0 public chain focusing on storage, while the FVM is an L1 public chain that serves the ecosystem. There is no scenario of migrating “mining” DC and CC to the FVM.
