short-paper

Open access

Evaluating the decentralisation of filecoin

Authors:

Andrea Michienzi,

Laura RicciAuthors Info & Claims

DICG '22: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for the Common Good

Pages 13 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/3565383.3566108

Published: 18 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Web3 is progressively decentralising Internet services with the introduction of the blockchain, from social networks to online trading. Filecoin is a Web3 storage marketplace implemented on top of the Interplanetary File System that aims at decentralising storage by rewarding users who pledge storage to the system. Clients form deals with storage miners, who store deals on the Filecoin blockchain for transparency and auditability. Storage miners can also obtain extra rewards when they mine a block. In this paper, we show that although Filecoin aims at complete decentralisation, the rewarding system acts as the opposite. We download a dataset composed of 47.5M messages and expose that most of the blocks are created by the same storage miners, who are also the ones that pledge more storage. An analysis of their identity shows that they belong to cloud companies, that have a lot of extra storage resources. The effect observed is due to the fact that storage miners are able to commit all extra storage to the system, even when there are no deals in them. Additionally, this effect is further intensified by recent updates to Filecoin, which let storage miners update committed storage to deal-containing storage effortlessly.

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Evaluating the decentralisation of filecoin

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cover image ACM Conferences

DICG '22: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for the Common Good

November 2022

60 pages

ISBN:9781450399289

DOI:10.1145/3565383

General Chairs:
Kaiwen Zhang
ETS
,
Abdelouahed Gherbi
ETS
,
Paolo Bellavista
University of Bologna, Italy

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 18 November 2022

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Middleware '22: 23rd International Middleware Conference

November 7, 2022

Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joitmc.2025.100502
Hameed ZBarzegar HIoini NPahl C(2024)Robust-DSN: A Hybrid Distributed Replication and Encoding Network Grouped with a Distributed Swarm Workflow SchedulerElectronics10.3390/electronics1310186113:10(1861)Online publication date: 10-May-2024
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Thillo IHameed ZPahl C(2024)Multi-Factor Trust Management in Distributed Storage Networks based on Capacity and Behavior2024 9th International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC)10.1109/FMEC62297.2024.10710228(228-236)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/FMEC62297.2024.10710228
Vanmathi CFarouk AAlhammad SMangayarkarasi RBhattacharya SKasyapa M(2024)The Role of Blockchain in Transforming Industries Beyond FinanceIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.346861112(148845-148867)Online publication date: 2024
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