Decentralized cloud storage network Filecoin’s recent mainnet launch, after hitting some initial turbulence, is now opening up a range of applications that previously only existed in centralized Web 2.0 environments.
“Filecoin really brings for the first time the ability to have a large scale application to be fully Web 3.0-native, so you can do things like video streaming or entire social networks, those kinds of applications are now possible in a Web 3.0 environment,” Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet told Forkast.News.
According to Benet, previous attempts at video hosting or distribution systems in Web 3.0 had been slowed down some form of centralization.
“But now this is becoming possible,” Benet said. “Now, you could actually store these massive datasets and compute on them in a fully decentralized cloud, and so that’s a super interesting use case that’s coming up.”
While Filecoin’s mainnet launch presents a wide variety of applications to now be available in decentralized networks, a large proportion of Filecoin’s miners are located in China due to its low energy rates and easy access to mining hardware manufacturers.
“Most of the cryptocurrency mining happens in China, and Filecoin right now is no different,” Benet said. “But what we expect to happen is that as the demand for storage comes in and increases around the world, that’s going to start pushing out a lot of the mining activities to a bunch of these other countries where clients are going to draw those miners to go there.”
By the second half of this year, visual intelligence tracking platform Sensity has identified more than 49,000 deepfake videos — a three-fold increase since July 2019.
