Some may say Web3 orgs have their heads in the clouds. And look, we get the temptation more than most — after all, Filecoin is a cloud storage network.
But sky-eyed puns aside, builders in the Filecoin ecosystem must prove that the value we create on the decentralized web is also valuable here on earth.
Luckily, there is no shortage of real-life examples for us to choose from.
Decentralization is returning value to those who create it, from Move-to-Earn joggers to Play-to-Earn gamers — and it has expanded the geography of economic opportunity, using Web3 tokenomics to help users in developing countries make a solid living.
Of course, those of us in the Filecoin community don’t have to look so far to see the real-life power of Web3.
The Filecoin ecosystem now includes hundreds of projects, addressing the opportunities and obstacles in everything from data markets and decentralized identities to consumer storage and NFTs. A few notable initiatives: - 🌿 Filecoin Foundation (FF) is working to bring the ecosystem’s environmental impacts down to zero through the Filecoin Green Initiative.
- 🤓 Wejoined forces with UNFINISHED to offer funding for projects that catalyze learning in Web3.
- 📚 FF’s sister non-profit, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), is supporting Harvard University's Library Innovation Lab in exploring how decentralized storage could preserve cultures for centuries.
Those are just a few of our more recent examples. And one of our greatest proof points for Web3’s value came in March, when a Telegram user posted a photo detailing the smoldering wreckage of what used to be a Ukrainian classroom.
Understanding that this could potentially be evidence of a war crime, researchers uploaded to the blockchain using Filecoin’s decentralized storage network — knowing that doing so would keep it from being tampered with by bad actors or government censors.
In difficult times, it’s not hard to understand the value of having a decentralized storage system, one in which no one person or entity can decide what is worth saving and what is deleted.
We are here to help show people the power of a decentralized web, and will continue to do so in this newsletter. We hope you will join us, both by reading and by sending us your thoughts at [email protected].
