Discussion: 2025 Vision Forecast from FIDL

[Kevin-FF-USA]

@willscott wrote out some of the vision and thoughts he sees as the trajectory the Fil+ program in 2025. Sharing in entirety for community thoughts, comments, review.

Fil+ 2025 Forecast

This document is meant as a reference to provide my view into the trajectory of the Filecoin plus incentive program, and where we might expect incentives to be in late 2025. This is provided by Will Scott, a member of the ‘Filecoin Incentive Design Lab’ (FIDL). FIDL is tasked with providing analytics and tooling to improve operations of the Fil+ program, but is not in charge of governance, and we are not authoritative on what decisions or changes will take place. Rather, this document is meant to provide my view of what seems most likely to happen, and hopefully can be useful in business planning.

Increased quality expectations for ‘open datasets’
A significant fraction of the network today sees the current open dataset onboarding as providing little value to Filecoin. Open data was introduced as a stop-gap alternative for finding external clients, an expansion of the slingshot program. Expect increasing expectations for these pathways. This increased scrutiny is likely (intentionally or not) making the onboarding of open data sets less lucrative than other types of data. In particular, expect additional checks for retrieval bandwidth, data preparation, and data usage. I would expect by late 2025 that moves are made to limit datacap distribution around open datasets such that datasets falling into this category account for less than 50% of onboarded data. It can be forecast that this trajectory will lead to increased competition and costs for onboarding within this category.

Relative rather than Absolute allocator metrics
Most allocators will find themselves operating in the context of a meta-allocator that ranks allocators based on an evaluation criteria (an evolution of cid checker reports today) and rejects renewals for the lowest performing allocators. Today this evaluation happens against a set of program rules by the governance team. The aim of using ranking between allocators is to incentivize an ongoing increase of quality, rather than optimizing for who can meet minimum requirements the most efficiently.

Refinement of retrieval testing & requirements
Expected updated versions of spark tooling that limits retrievals to HTTP, validates that retrieved content is able to match the contents of deals, and is increasingly less straightforward to distinguish from user traffic. Expect also additional retrieval testing tooling that tracks bandwidth and latency for retrievals.

Focus on pathways evaluating client payments
Multiple allocation pathways will be proposed and incentivized to distribute datacap in cases where it can be demonstrated the data is associated with capital flowing into the Filecoin ecosystem. There is not yet a successful evaluation metric for this type of data, but multiple groups are currently tasked with identifying mechanisms for tracking that data is associated with inbound payments to the Filecoin network.

A restructured, deeper allocator tree
This year there are ~60-80 allocators operating as a first step past the previous LDN structure. Expect in the next year that there will be a categorization of allocators based on how they have asserted they will evaluate data as bringing value to filecoin. The top level Fil+ program will aim to issue datacap to no more than 10 different evaluation frameworks, which will then be responsible for sub-allocating the datacap to individual allocators. This subdivision is aimed at enabling at least some parts of the allocation pathway to operate with higher certainty that there will not be interruptions in datacap flow.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12_S53ZVY7ndqhVSvQxJS-0tBaPlxpErcRJTGYQpBWwA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.qielpzai1d6p