Today, I'll be talking about negative storage auction house. OK, this is my slide. All right, so what is BDE? BDE is basically a data storage auction house serving two primary purposes. We want to supply storage providers on Filecoin Network with a consistent supply of few plus deals. And also, we want to match data communities around the world with distributed storage solutions. Now, we built BDE to be a data storage marketplace where there's liquidity and a fair price discovery process for data storage services. We want data services to flow freely. We want to offer transparency into that mechanism, which we think can help play a role in governance. But when we built BDE, it turns out that the market decided that storage providers have willingness to pay for data. This is a paradigm shift that is not possible with the Web2 world. So this is what we call a negative price storage. And it's not just one storage provider thinking this way. There is market consensus sort of. In the past four and a half months, we have done like 24 petabyte of data transactions. 90,000 Filecoin have exchanged hands. And all these are very interesting observations and insights into behaviors of data participants in our network. It helps us understand why someone is willing to pay 7 Filecoin per terabyte of data, and why someone is willing to pay 0.01. So these are all very interesting observations. I'm happy to share more later if you guys are interested. So many people ask, how is this possible, especially my friends who are not in Filecoin? So the reason why it is possible is because of crypto-economic incentives, which is why I'm here talking about it at CryptoEcon Day today. The expected yearly rewards from one terabyte of CC sector based on this week's statistics is around 4 Filecoin. Whereas because of Filecoin plus program, we can get 40 Filecoin per terabyte of data if you store verified deals. So it's highly likely that storage providers with 100% of field-class deals come ahead in terms of ROI, which is good for our ecosystem because we want storage providers to continue to be profitable, especially since they are providing a very valuable service to the network. But let's go through the numbers here. These are all assumptions. Some of these I got from Starboard Network dashboard. Some of it from Big Data Exchange. Some of it are whispers from storage providers and data clients. I don't know how accurate they are. I love to update these numbers. If you have any insights or if they're drastically wrong, let me know. But over here, Filecoin is, we assume it at $5.5, $5.50. For every 100 terabyte of data, for Filecoin plus, you get 4,000 Filecoin rewards. I won't go through every single line, but you can tell that if you are storing Filecoin plus, you come out way ahead compared to a CC sector. And let's say hypothetically, Filecoin is at $10. It's even way higher. So what this means is that if you're a storage provider, you should use any channel to acquire Filecoin plus deal as long as it's profitable to do so. You can build a BD team to source for deals. You can source for deals on Big Data Exchange. You can use Slingshot programs. The bottom line here is storage providers should continuously store Filecoin plus deal to maximize their ROI. Now, another question I get asked often is, is this sustainable? We think it's going to be sustainable for a very long time because right now, the utilization rate is only at 1.6%. And because block rewards are fixed and deflationary and it's a competitive field, so as a storage provider, they are always competing to earn block rewards. So as long as utilization rate remains low, competition among storage providers will result in negative price storage. And people say, okay, what if I onboard a lot more data tomorrow? It's highly unlikely, again, because of crypto-economic stuff because when you onboard a lot of data, you need a lot of pledges and then all this crypto-economic equation come in which I wouldn't dive too deep in because I have no knowledge on it. But basically, we think that negative price storage is sustainable and we do want it to get a positive, which I'll explain why later. But before I go there, it can even get more negative because from our observation in June, storage providers were paying less than one fell coin per tab by of data and now they're consistently paying one and three and a half. So very interesting dynamics, again, because of crypto-economic incentives. For now, we think that negative price storage, which is a result of market dynamics, is a great feature collectively for our entire ecosystem. Why? Because it's basically a redistribution of block rewards from storage providers and it flows down to a few other teams. Primarily, we want redistribution to happen because it will incentivize non-foul coin data communities into our network and this is the next stage of growth of foul coin. But at the same time, we also noticed that with this redistribution, you enable more robust data onboarding. What do I mean? I think in the past few months, we have seen that teams are being built around selling as a service or coming out with solutions for better data preparation services. There are markets for that right now and this redistribution also enables smaller SP to source for deals more easily. Previously, it might be harder for them but now they can go to exchange like big data, exchange, look for one or two terabyte of data. So this is like making it even more decentralized. And of course, as an SP, we've noticed that sometimes data clients might not want to deal with you. So if you're an SP and you have a strong desire to onboard more deal, you have to accede to their request to, for example, have a faster bandwidth feed and that's what we've noticed. Right now, most of our storage providers are around like three gates. And of course, there are people with like 30 or like less but I think you need to have like, what we think is like the faster you have is the better it is for network growth. But collectively, as a community, we want storage price to turn positive. We are not like supporters of negative price. I think it's just a function of market dynamics. I think ultimately everyone agrees that it should turn positive. How can it happen? The rate of growth of data onboarded must greatly outpace the rate of growth of capacity. And to do that, we first need to onboard more data through incentives for a higher utilization rate. And when we do that, we raise awareness and adoption by helping data communities to understand the viability and attractiveness of storing data on Filecoin network. Once they do that, then they can compare. And when they compare, they'll find that it's cheaper, it's more attractive. So that's where we want to get to. So of course, storage providers are very important participants in our ecosystem. We want them to get rewarded. They're very important. So how do they get rewarded now? They primarily get rewarded using viability rewards, right? Which will diminish over time, which means you need Filecoin price to go up. And the main reason for, I mean, there are many reasons why Filecoin price to go up. I won't go too much into macroeconomics. But one of the most important drivers is utility. So we want our services to have utility for data participants all around the world. And this is a two-fold thing, right? You want Filecoin price to go up, but you also want to get rewarded for services that you provide to data participants such as storage, retrieval, and computation. We all agree that you shouldn't be paying for it. But because of critical economic incentives, you are still getting rewarded. You're still getting positive ROI. So that's okay for now. So how do we ensure that all this happened? The first step, I think I changed my slide, but, this is not my slide, but this slide is supposed to be showing you the Filecoin master plan. The step one is to build the biggest decentralized storage network in the world, which is what we have done already. And step three is, you know, build large-scale compute to the data, bring computer data to build large-scale apps. And we are at step two right now, which is to onboard more data to safeguard humanity's data. And to do that, one of the ways is through critical economic incentives where I explained earlier, negative price storage has happened. And through incentives, we onboard more data, right? So I hope everyone can agree that negative price storage is collectively helpful right now. And of course, there are many ways to onboard data. BDE is one of them. And since I'm representing Big Data Exchange, I got to show a few slides, just three of one more slides, bear with me. Why should data cap clients come to BDE? The first is you get outright financial incentives. This applies to both data cap clients and non-data cap clients. What we really want to target is non-powercoin native data communities, right?  Earlier, I mentioned bandwidth speed.  Maybe you want a specific region because of certain laws in your region, or maybe because you have certain trust, or maybe because you want a faster speed of retrieval. So these are requirements you can set. And ultimately, you choose one that fits your requirement. Another thing is that you get prompt payment. Once the deal-making is done, you receive tokens. What this enables you to use is, you know, you can build, continue to build your team, continue to specialize in certain services related to data, so we think that's good. And the last thing I want to address is, I think recently there's a lot of like, governance issue around data cap. We think that having transactions on BDE where notaries or governance team can observe the flow and the movement of data cap, of payment. We may not be able to, I don't know if I can say this, but we may not be able to prevent abuse, but what we can do is when transactions are on chain, we can monitor abuse. When we monitor abuse, then we can take necessary steps to prevent them in the future. So I think having all this on chain is helpful for governance process. But again, I'm not expert, no expert in this. That's what we think. And then for storage providers, what can we do? You know, we provide a consistent supply of few plus deal. We have transparent pricing, so it's efficient for everyone. And also there's an efficient deal-making process, which means you can onboard data at a faster pace. And then when your ceiling capacity becomes available, you can get few plus on demand. There's also a very fair payment. You don't release your tokens until the deal-making is done. The next point, number six, is that this really helps. There are many different types of data available.  If you're a European-based storage provider, you wanna look for European data, you can do that too. Next part, which is something we are very excited about, is that as you do more transactions on BDE, you can build your reputation and profile. And this allows data clients to choose you. If you are providing a good and valuable service, you should be rewarded. That's what we think the profile is gonna be very important. And with profiling, you are able to let lenders know that you are a long-term player in this ecosystem. So we think that can be helpful for financing as well. So this is something that we plan to roll out in the future. So earlier we mentioned, as an SP, you should use any channel to get few plus deals, right? But they are not mutually exclusive.  If you are, if you have agreement with like other data cap clients, you can also do this transaction on Big Data Exchange because we don't take any transaction fee. There's no loss to anyone. And what we offer is accountability. We offer a fair deal-making process. We also think that, again, I mentioned transparency because it's really come out quite a bit this week. It's very important. There's transparency of transactions, transparency of payment flow. This will help with, provide more information to the governance team and the notaries. So this upcoming roadmap, we want to build a deal-making dashboard for our users so that the deal-making process is better and more efficient. Right now we see all the transactions, deal-making happen on a daily basis between storage providers and data cap clients. There are a lot of obstacles. And we think we've identified some of them. We want to make it easier. Next, when we migrate to FVM, we'll have the ability for storage providers to be in Filecoin. Right now, we really appreciate all our users because to do a transaction on BD, you've got to change your Filecoin to Renfail, wait for 120 minutes for confirmation, and then spend 25 bits each way before you can bid. So really appreciate it. But I think with FVM, it's really going to turbocharge this. So we're very excited. Yeah, so with that, I end my presentation. We really want feedback. We want a big, better product. So please, as many questions as possible. Yeah, thank you. Tough question. Thank you. It's interesting, like I say. You talked about governance and totally agree how important it is, good governance and transparency.  So who is we? No. I don't mean that we monitor, we just want to provide that record, that transactions record for people to monitor. We have no expertise in governance. We don't know how to do that. We're just a marketplace to provide liquidity, to enable a fair price discovery process. But we think that transactions on record can help people who are monitoring this to have more weapons, I would say. I think governance is very hard. You have to look at many different things, quantitatively, qualitatively, objectively, subjectively. That's not our role to play, but we just want to play our part. Yeah, I mean, I think maybe not directly to you, but I was saying in general, who is actually enforcing governance? Well, we had the discussion in the earlier session where it was about the improvement proposals, right? And it was also kind of loosey-goosey governance. I said, well, if nobody puts up a vote, veto is the proposal that it goes through, right? So I get the sense that there are no real governance structures in place as of yet. Is that correct? I mean, this is probably a question to the room. I think there's governance for data cap. I would just address the elephant in the room, right? Recently, people are saying that people are paying for data cap. That's a governance issue. We don't think BD can stop that. Let's say if a data cap plan consistently lists the auction on Big Data Exchange and sell the auction, the verified deal, to a storage provider who consistently bits lower, then you have a pattern of behavior that is questionable. That raises question for the notaries and then they can make their own assessment of whether this behavior should be encouraged or discouraged. And I'll let the governance team address more of this question. Anyone wants to participate? I just want to throw in the, there is a lot of rigor around the Filecoin Governance protocol, like there's a whole governance, there are several governance teams and people that kind of look at that. So I think we're just pointing out in a macro sense in some of the conversations that we've had here today that it's hard to do that. And so it's not that nobody's paying attention to it and it's just loosey-goosey. That's just a difficult problem, but there are people working on it. So I'll let other people talk to that, but they just wanted to interject that point. But Deep, go ahead. Yeah, sure. So specifically to address this point first, my name is Deep. One of the things I work on is called Filecoin Plus. Filecoin Plus is a sub-community within Filecoin generally that tries to identify use cases that are worth supporting with this resource that CB keeps using their term data cap. It's not actually a cap, it's actually like a resource that you get in the network to make deals extremely cheaply. And so there's a whole governance body and within that we have a trust and transparency working group that looks at abuse of that resource, is working on a bunch of models to probabilistically identify when things are going wrong and profiles and tracks reputation of different entities and actors in the network over a period of time. So the work that CB is doing to make his data extremely transparent is exactly what we want to see because then we can start to aggregate that and make a bunch of other different data sources also transparent and visible for individuals that then have the power to actually make decisions in the network to continue giving people resources or take away resources, et cetera. And so we have a whole dispute mechanism for that in our little sub-community as well as tools that we're building to track that stuff. So if you're interested in that, please come check out the conversation for Filecoin Plus specifically, separate from the overall Filecoin Governance thing, which as Dave said, is also an incredibly robust process. Question for you is one of the challenges we see in the Phil Plus world is that we see a lot of people coming in to get data cap with this like desire to make deals right away, but the amount of latent data cap that existed in the past. And today we've narrowed the margins a little bit because we've gotten better at giving out smaller amounts and giving them out faster, but it used to be pretty big. Like there's a lot of like latent data cap. So clients would often say things like I need to do this right now and they get data cap and nothing moves for six months. It's not that it's a bad or a good thing. It's just a nature of complexities that exists in the real world around deal making and stuff. Can you walk us through a little bit of what are the mechanisms that, I know you've solved this problem, but I want you to share with the rest of the community as well, the mechanisms that you have today to ensure that a client isn't just making money off of an auction and never actually delivering on the deals to the SPs. Basically the SP will do the deal making with the data cap, the verified deal client, right? So they will go into a deal making process and it could take like days or weeks or months. And it's only when the SP decided that deal making process is done, that's when they click on the confirm button on our platform and then tokens get released. So the data cap clients, the verified deal clients don't get the tokens out front. Yeah, does that answer your question? Yeah, is there any mechanism for tracking this on chain or an Oracle or something that you might be able to build with the use of the FVM that makes this a little bit more trustless and so, yeah, beyond just somebody clicking. No, it's a very good idea. Right now you can track the transactions, but I think we can definitely discuss more and try to build this so that it's automated and that data gets populated into the, maybe the governance process. That's something we can definitely explore, especially with FVM. Yeah, because if you're not taking a transaction fee, then I could make a million deals with myself, pay myself a million tokens and then have a really good reputation in your platform, but I've done nothing. But because it's a fair market, right, you can keep bidding, like let's say you bid 200 for your own data and it's auction mechanism. Someone can come in and bid 300 file coin at the very last second. You as a data verified deal client, you can still choose 200, but if you consistently choose someone with a lower price or consistently choose the same three storage providers, then there is a pattern of behavior that could raise some flex. That's what we're hoping we can review, we can show to the governance or notaries. Cool, thank you. All right, I have a question. If others have them, keep in mind, maybe we have time for one more. CB, I was wondering, a lot of the storage providers in the file coin ecosystem started out just running the racks and they're very tech oriented and so they go through all of the, they gather the knowledge required to understand the protocol, plug into it, do all the proofs of space, time to prove you I have the storage capacity in interacting with the protocol. And so a lot of them do not necessarily have like an end to end business development funnel. So BDE being an auction platform, I think that's a very valuable tool in the ecosystem. It provides a front end to bring those deals in. And I'm wondering what kinds of things are you thinking about and maybe already doing to fill the top of that funnel? Are you doing like paid advertisements or marketing or do you have like teams of people going out? So I understand a lot of the data that is coming in currently is from like universities will say, hey, we have this big data set of x-rays or a big data set of astrophysics simulations. And so that's the kind of thing that in a lot of cases we're ingesting. What is your sort of like to fill the funnel approach? Yeah, that's a very good question. And it's something we constantly think about because ultimately we want to attract non-file-coordinated data communities into the system. So one thing we've done is we've built another platform it's called Data Conservation House. It's a DCH.club is a very, very new product. What this does is, you know, two things. One, it removes all the technical barrier for onboarding data for universities or academic or data institutions. They don't have to know about the data application process. They don't have to learn about data sealing or do-making. If they want to, they can, but they don't have to. But we think that they will eventually want to because of the incentivizations, especially if the amount gets larger. And that's great for the ecosystem because you want more teams to be specialized in this area. That's the first thing, right? The second thing is we rely on the liquidity provided by storage providers on BDE. So we ensure that if you are a real data institution, you have data, you will get incentives because we have a robust network of storage providers who are willing to bid on it. Does that answer your question? That's cool. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. H1. Thanks, CB. Just two quick questions for me. One, you mentioned that we've reached market consensus on negatively priced storage. So I'm just curious, do you have a range of estimates on how many SPs are utilizing BDE today? Yes, we have around 100 plus SPIDs. I don't think there's market consensus in that way, but I think what I was trying to say is that there's more than one or two select SPs who have collectively come to this price. And we also understand that even for transactions, they are not happening on BDE. There is a negative pricing in pricing. So most of the time, the demaking are done where storage providers are paying for verified views through incentives. And of course there are storage providers with consistent supply and they don't have to pay for the lack of a better word. And that's great. If you can do that, and everyone can do that, then we can get more data on board it. It's perfect, we can get there faster. Yeah, I mean, 100 sounds like a great start. I guess the second part of that question is, in your presentation, you made it sound like we might not be in this world of negatively priced storage forever. So is BDE looking at building the other side of that marketplace, the positively-advised storage marketplace? No, we don't have any inclination. We just let the market decide. Let's say, if three file coin doesn't work right now, right? No storage provider will bid for it. A verified deal client will see that it's, oh, three file coin for TebiPak doesn't work, they will lower the price, 1.5, 1, 0.5, and then eventually it will turn to positive. This is a result of market mechanism. It's got nothing to do with what we are trying to build here. We just follow what data participants in this network want. The fact that today is at 3.5 or 4, it shows that if I list my data at full fail for TIP, it likely will get sold because people are willing to do it. Thanks, CB. Vick. I guess kind of a follow on Ashwant's question is can BDE support a marketplace in which storage is positively rather than negatively priced? Yes, I think we can, because we want to get there. When it gets positive, there are only a few reasons why it can get to positive. It means a lot of data has been on board already. We're talking about exabyte of data. When we get to that level of data, then a lot of things can come in. You can start doing more than storage. You can do retrieval. You can do, because it's a funnel, right?  When we get to that stage is when all these data services are being valued by data participants around the world, and I think there will be a lot of transaction services. For example, if you are someone who is doing computer data, this is out there. Okay, I don't know what is going to happen soon, but maybe you want some, you know, satellite information. That's when you pay for the retrieval of that information. To get there, maybe you need to pay for a data indexer who is indexing for this information for this particular industry, right? And then you go back to the storage, and then when you have the computer data, you can come on BDE and sell that result to someone, to the end user who values that data. Ultimately, BDE wants to be a marketplace for the entire supply chain of data, from origination, to onboarding, to retrieval, to compute, to end and result. We can even be a marketplace for data assets. You know, right now it's only a two-sided equation driven by one economic equation, which is build reward between data verified deal client and storage providers. But we think that more participants will come in. There can be data brokers, data arbitrageers, not saying we want to encourage that, but I think we want to ensure that there's liquidity so that it can drive a more efficient process. Hope I answered your question. Okay, thank you.


My name is John Bewe, and I'm a Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department at King's College London. I've been trained as a historian, I've written about a range of historical issues, really from 19th-century foreign policy, right through the 20th century to 21st-century questions of statecraft such as intervention and non-intervention. So, it's really historically-minded work, but with a present-minded application as well. I've written a number of biographies, some conceptual books as well such as a history of Real Politique, and my current research looks at the question of world order. Where does this idea of world order come from? What are the intellectual origins of the idea of world order? And what is the changing world order in today's world with the relative decline of western power and the rise of Asia and particularly China in India? And really that question, while it's historically-minded and it's historical research, goes to the core of some really central, crucial issues about 21st-century international stability and geopolitics, such as when one power arises, in the case of China, for example, how does an established power such as the United States respond? So, it really goes to the heart of questions of international stability, as I say, the avoidance of war peace, but also it appreciates the role of power in international affairs. So, one area I'm particularly interested in teaching and very much influences my work is the idea of grand strategy. Now, the concept of grand strategy has made a bit of a comeback or had a renaissance in recent years. And really, while there's debate about what grand strategy is, in essence it means big picture long-term thinking. And there's a tendency in some of the way in which academics look at global affairs for understandable reasons to focus on specific areas or countries. But something is missed in that occasionally, and that is the question of how everything connects together. So, grand strategy is a way of thinking and approaching international relations and big questions such as a rise and fall of nations as holistically as possible without dispensing with the necessary detail and expertise that comes on a case by case study. And also, grand strategy has a contemporary political application as well. In the 21st century, with a series of proliferating threats and challenges and the changing political atmosphere, governments often find it hard to deal with or respond to threats over the long term. It's very difficult for a government to think, particularly a democracy, to think beyond five-year terms or four-year terms in the case of the United States. And to think in terms of 10, 20, 30, 40 years ahead. And really grand strategy aims to bring back that, as I say, big picture long-term perspective. The States don't just plan about what comes around the corner. They don't simply crisis manage when it comes to international affairs. But they have some idea going forward about where they might want to end up. And academics can't provide really the answers because that must come from politicians. But they can remind politicians about the need to think about these big questions such as the rise of China, the relative decline of Western power as well. And that's the essence of grand strategy, as I say, to insert a different way of thinking back into political debate rather than obsessing all the time about the here and the now and the latest crisis. So, while I'm a historian, I always try and engage in contemporary debates. Now, that comes in different forms. It can be writing in newspapers or magazines. I've written extensively about Western foreign policy in Syria, for example, since 2011 and the whole question of intervention and non-intervention. But if I was to think of a specific anecdote in terms of influencing contemporary and public debate, it would be that recently I appeared before the Defence Select Committee at the House of Commons where I spoke on the whole question of the future of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the broader Western Alliance and all the components that go into that such as Britain's relationship with Europe, the changing role of the United States in the world and the whole cohesiveness of what was the international system that emerged at the end of the Second World War.