What are The Main Usage Scenarios of Filecoin?

The Filecoin ecosystem is very large and still expanding rapidly, it has become the backbone of the distributed network. With the increasing demand for cloud storage, new and different usage scenarios have appeared. So, what new usage scenarios does Filecoin have now?

NFT.Storage

In the summer of 2021, NFTs received unprecedented attention. At the time, NFTs almost dominated the crypto space in the form of social media avatars, fine arts, collectibles, and music. Due to the performance issues of each chain, the metadata of many NFTs is stored off the chain. Since the metadata of NFTs is not stored in a decentralized and unmanipulated way, the content and value of NFTs are jeopardized. To solve this problem, NFT.Storage was born.

NFT.Storage (https://nft.storage/) utilizes Filecoin and IPFS to provide a simple distributed storage solution for NFT content and metadata. It provides persistent redundant storage through dedicated IPFS servers managed by NFT.Storage and Filecoin. After joining the FilecoinPlus incentive program, NFT.Storage can provide unlimited NFT storage space for free.

After its release in April 2021, NFT.Storage already has permanently stored 40 million copies of NFT data, totaling more than 260TB in size. This enables a wide range of users, including individual artists and large institutions such as OpenSea, MakersPlace, MagicEden, Holaplex, Jigstack, and Galaxy, to take advantage of persistent NFT storage.

Web3 Storage

Filecoin aims to become the storage layer for Web3. To achieve this goal, Filecoin has continuous cooperation with different blockchain and smart contract platforms. Recently, Filecoin partnered with Polygon with the goal of meeting the storage and infrastructure requirements of developers of games and NFT-related Web3 projects.

To simplify the process of building a Web3 App on Filecoin, the team launched Web3.Storage (https://web3.storage/), allowing developers to directly access data on Filecoin without having to deal with the complex distributed storage network.

Overall, Web3.Storage has experienced steady growth since its launch, and the storage items have grown from 3 million in August 2021 to over 15 million now.

Audio and video applications

Recently, several audio and video applications utilizing Filecoin and IPFS technology have gained a lot of attention. Audius is a music streaming service that looks and works like SoundCloud but utilizes IPFS technology. Currents.fm and Inflow Music support a community of music creators. Huddle01 could be the next Zoom, a low-bandwidth video conference platform customized for remote meetings, and focusing on the NFT community.

As the Filecoin ecosystem is becoming mature, more scenarios are being discovered. The development of the Filecoin virtual machine will unlock more methods that seem impossible previously, thereby creating more new scenarios for Filecoin.