Filecoin, a decentralized storage network that raised over $200 million in a coin offering, has announced Filecoin Discover – a push to encourage miners to join the Filecoin network.
According to the company, the Filecoin Discover store is a “continuously-growing catalog of several petabytes of public data spanning literature, science, art, and history.” Miners interested in participation can choose which datasets they want to store, and receive that data on a drive at cost. In exchange for storing this verified data, miners will earn additional Filecoin on top of the normal block rewards for storing data. The current catalog of open-source datasets includes; ENCODE, 1000 Genomes, Project Gutenberg, Berkley’s Self Driving Data, and more projects, and datasets are being added every day.
Ian Darrow, Head of Operations at Filecoin, commented on the announcement:
“Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every day. That data includes 294 billion emails, 500 million tweets, and 64 billion social media messages. But it’s also climate science reports, disease tracking maps, connected car coordinates and so much more. It’s critical that we preserve the data that will serve as the backbone of future research and discovery.”
Miners that choose to participate in the Filecoin Discover program may receive hard drives preloaded with verified data, as well as instructions for setup and maintenance, according to the company. The Filecoin team will also host a Slack channel (#fil-discover-support) where miners can learn more.
Filecoin has had its fair share of bumps along the way. Last month, Filecoin announced more delays before its mainnet can be officially launched – years after raising money.