Jeff Albus

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When building on Solana up until now, you&#8217;ve really only had two bad choices for storing and delivering your app&#8217;s data.



You could lean on Web2 giants like Cloudflare or AWS, which are fast and easy, but very much centralized and outside the crypto ethos. Or you could try to piece together more decentralized fixes using IPFS, Arweave, and other assorted gateways — bearing in mind that, while these latter methods do work, they require lots of duct-tape and set-top thwacking to dial in.



Decentralized CDN Pipe Network aims to change all that with Firestarter Storage, an infrastructure play designed to transform Pipe into a full-stack Cloudflare alternative for the Solana ecosystem.



Until now, Pipe has operated behind the scenes, powering Solana&#8217;s full <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-proof-of-history">proof-of-history</a> archive and snapshots via its Firestarter infrastructure.



Now, with Firestarter Storage, Pipe graduates from decentralized transport to a full-stack cloud competitor, combining origin storage, CDN delivery and edge compute into a Cloudflare-class system — but decentralized from the ground up.



Developers can tap into the same backbone to serve anything from pay-as-you-scroll video to edge-optimized AI workloads.



&#8220;Storage from day one has been a critical element of Pipe Network&#8217;s service as a decentralized CDN running a global network of over 280,000 points-of-presence (PoP) node operators,&#8221; said David Rhodus, founder of Permissionless Labs.



&#8220;This would be impossible without origin support, which is already holding Solana&#8217;s full data set — 1 PB containing 350 million files — and cutting sync time by up to 30% through Solana Snapshots.&#8221;



Unlike legacy CDNs, Firestarter serves content directly from Pipe&#8217;s native storage layer, meaning it never leaves the Pipe Network.



Content lives entirely within the decentralized system, with pricing bundled at the protocol level — 1 $PIPE token per gigabyte for the base tier.&nbsp;



For developers, this manifests entirely new architecture capabilities: streaming micropayments per byte, geo-pinned smart contracts with hard data sovereignty guarantees, and pop-level compute for edge inference and ultra-low-latency gaming.



&#8220;Pipe&#8217;s unified fabric lets frontend code stream satoshi-sized, onchain payments per byte, so devs can launch pay-as-you-scroll video and per-query dataset APIs instead of pre-purchasing bandwidth buckets,&#8221; Rhodus told Lightspeed.



A critical differentiator is Pipe&#8217;s ability to meet jurisdictional and defense-grade requirements.



As Rhodus explained, &#8220;Firestarter nodes can be whitelisted to run only inside a customer&#8217;s jurisdiction, with remote-attested proofs that no replica ever leaves the boundary.&#8221;



With Firestarter now public, Pipe Network is positioning itself as a new foundation for real-time, decentralized content distribution, with sovereignty, speed and cost-efficiency converging at the protocol layer.



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Lightspeed Newsletter

Pipe Network debuts Firestarter Storage for Solana developers

James Cirrone

Decentralized storage solutions appear to be gaining credibility with the scientific community and non-Web3 clients.&nbsp;



The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, an Australian medical organization with over 230 scientists and 23 laboratories, has selected Filecoin as its preferred method to store its massive volume of research.&nbsp;



Established in 1994, the institute was officially inaugurated by the late Princess Diana.



Nearly thirty years later, that same institute has parked roughly 137 terabytes of cardiac research data with the Distributed Storage Solutions (DSS), a top storage provider on the Filecoin network, according to a statement shared with Blockworks.



Todd Ryman, the institute’s IT director, said that the move over to Filecoin officially began in September 2022. Published public data started getting ported over in November 2022.&nbsp;



Ryman said the reason the institute ditched “on-premises storage systems” and cloud-based solutions was because <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/filecoin">Filecoin</a> offered cost savings.



The institute is no longer “charged excessive fees from cloud providers if we need to restore any of this data,” Ryman said.&nbsp;



And as previously mentioned, there is a lot of data.



A <a href="https://destor.io/victor-chang-cardiac-research-institute-case-study">case study</a> published by Filecoin DeStor explained that the institute’s SyncroPatch machine — a medical instrument that can study cardiovascular cells — can generate 20,000 data points per day. Therefore, it produces terabytes worth of data on a weekly basis.&nbsp;



Ryman told Blockworks that Filecoin’s decentralized nature and emphasis on data integrity makes it a good fit for the institute’s needs.



“The decentralized architecture enhances data redundancy and durability, reducing the risk of data loss due to hardware failures or other localized incidents. Filecoin&#8217;s use of blockchain technology ensures that data integrity is maintained, making it suitable for preserving valuable research findings,” Ryman told Blockworks.&nbsp;



According to Stefaan Vervaet, the head of network growth at Protocol Labs, the Filecoin network comprises 3,500 storage provider nodes, often referred to as validators. These nodes cryptographically verify on-chain data daily. Protocol Labs is a key contributor to Filecoin.&nbsp;



Additionally, Vervaet told Blockworks the data, including the cardiac institute’s data, isn’t stored on-chain. Rather, “the hash that represents the data is stored on-chain.”



This means data on the network isn’t identified by an IP address, its name, or its file type. The hash, Vervaet said, is essentially a user’s “unique handle” to get to the desired content, which would be stored on DSS or any of the other storage providers on Filecoin.



Sharing data with other researchers, something that’s crucially important in the field of medical science, is also something that Ryman says is possible with Filecoin.&nbsp;



“With Filecoin&#8217;s distributed storage and retrieval mechanisms, we can easily provide any researchers with access to specific datasets without the need for large-scale data transfers,” he said. “This enhances collaboration and accelerates research outcomes by facilitating seamless data sharing while maintaining the privacy and security of our datasets.”



The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute isn’t the only respected body to use Filecoin. Other clients include the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Utah, and known Web3 players such as <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/solana">Solana</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/opensea">OpenSea</a>.



With its nearly 1700 clients, Filecoin has onboarded 1.5 EiB of data.&nbsp;



To put that in perspective, that 1.5 EiB equals 1.7 billion gigabytes. That’s roughly equivalent to the storage capacity of 13.5 million base model iPhones.



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filecoin

Australian cardiac institute ditches cloud storage in favor of Filecoin

Macauley Peterson

In a period when venture funding is relatively scarce, hackathons and accelerator programs are a prime way for budding developers teams to get rolling and draw attention.



Longhash Ventures’ Web3 accelerators arm, LongHashX, a veteran at running the latter, announced Thursday the details of its next cohort building on Filecoin.



Partnering with Filecoin’s research and development company, Protocol Labs, the “FVM Genesis Cohort” focuses on the Filecoin Virtual Machine, or FVM, which invites decentralized app (dapp) developers familiar with Ethereum and the <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/evm">EVM</a>.



Filecoin’s FVM launched in March, but Protocol Labs and LongHash have jointly run three prior accelerator cohorts since 2020.



Longhash is a devotee of the multichain thesis, according to chief operating officer Stefano Bury.



“One of the critical components of that is decentralized storage and hence we love the Filecoin ecosystem and we love to invest in venture building — in teams that are building in that space,” Bury told Blockworks.



The global, fully remote accelerator program will start in mid-October and is accepting applications until Sept. 30. Five teams will be selected to receive $200,000 in <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/venture-capital">funding</a> in exchange for a 4% equity stake.&nbsp;



The program also includes a 12-week curriculum, mentorship and access to LongHash’s network of founders and investors.



A concurrent Builders&#8217; Fellowship Program will select 20 to 25 projects and offer technical and developer support from Protocol Labs alongside workshops and mentoring sessions with LongHashX Venture Builders.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">New focus on AI</h2>



The latest cohort is expected to focus largely on use cases related to artificial intelligence (AI), DeFi, and decentralized social.



One example with an AI hook is the burgeoning field of prompt engineering — for example, how users direct AI models such as Stable Diffusion to produce a desired output.



Sarah Thiam, Protocol Labs’ developer experience lead, told Blockworks that a “prompt marketplace” — a type of “data DAO” — is a likely product candidate for the Filecoin ecosystem.



“If you&#8217;ve used Stable Diffusion or use ChatGPT, sometimes you want a very specific outcome,” Thiam told Blockworks, “Images are tricky, so if you want something super nuanced — if you have created the perfect prompt — you could actually have that stored in a prompt marketplace.”



Filecoin recently championed a <a href="https://devfolio.co/projects/fevm-data-dao-starter-kit-kangaroo-2f3d">data DAO starter kit</a>, which Thiam explained can be used to govern a set of data, stored on <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/blockchain-storing-messages-from-mars">IPFS</a>,&nbsp;for use in AI processes.



There will also be a need for basic DeFi primitives like bridges, decentralized exchanges and liquidity pools, which Ruben Amenyogbo with Protocol Lab’s Builders Fund and FILVC described as “table stakes.” But he’s more interested in dapps that only make sense on Filecoin.



The accelerator is part of the third step in Filecoin’s “master plan,” Amenyogbo said. After building the world’s largest decentralized storage network with over 13 exabytes of capacity, the team has been focused on filling that storage space with usable data.



“What can you do with all that data that is stored there, using the novel things that only blockchain allows us to do — that is step number three,” Amenyogbo said.



Coming out of the accelerator, he’s expecting to see “a number of pioneers that are going to bring use cases that need a new name.”



“What do you call a collective that is going to store and monetize genetics data in a decentralized way — what do you even call that?” Amenyogbo said. “I don&#8217;t know, but I want to see it.”



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Filecoin accelerator program explores frontier of ‘compute on data’

Bessie Liu

Community Labs, a Web3 native software development company, is launching “Venture Studio,” focused on accelerating the adoption of Arweave — a database storage blockchain that also supports smart contracts.



The purpose of Venture Studio is to prepare startups and founders through the process of launching a standalone company on the Arweave ecosystem.



In an interview with Blockworks, Community Labs COO Kyla Witte said aspiring founders will be able to “ideate, validate, build, launch and scale,” during their time with Venture Studio.



So far, one protocol that has launched through Venture Studio — Execution Machine, a code agnostic application development environment, according to Witte. ​But only now is the company ready to “go public” with the studio.&nbsp;



“It’s something we’ve been building in the background for a few months now,” Witte said. “We have a rolling application for founders who are interested in developing protocols into businesses, but we’re also looking for people that want to come and build with us.”



Modeled after ConsenSys, an Ethereum-focused software development company, Community Labs was founded by 19-year-old Tate Berenbaum.&nbsp;



Berenbaum has been building on Arweave since 2019 when he was still a high school student.&nbsp;



“The story is kind of funny, I clicked on a Brave ad — the Brave browser that was boasting permanent storage — and that’s how I discovered Arweave,” Berenbaum said.



He recently closed a $30 million strategic funding round for Community Labs led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and Blockchain Capital among others.



At a high level, Arweave is a permanent data storage blockchain, where once you pay a one time transaction fee you are able to store a piece of data on it forever. But over time, Berenbaum began noticing other user cases for the blockchain.



“We realized that it’s an incredible language-agonistic smart contract layer,” Berenbaum said.



“These smart contracts can be written in any programming language — and people can build their own execution environments for these smart contracts…and Community Labs is really focused on enabling these types of use cases.”



In fact, the Arweave smart contract layer has <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/24/hong-kongs-apple-daily-to-live-on-in-blockchain-free-of-censors.html">attracted</a> Hong Kong cyber activists, who have been using the censorship-proof blockchain to archive newspaper articles from Apple Daily after it was forced to shut down.



Arweave announced a <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/meta-pins-web3-hopes-on-instagram-creators-minting-nfts/">partnership with Meta</a> last which, which will be using the blockchain for archiving digital collectibles. That sent the price of Arwave’s native token AR soaring by over <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/arweave">60%</a>. But the move was short-lived, and AR is now back at pre-announcement levels, trading for about $10.20 at the time of writing.



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