Filecoin Powergate progress update for July 21

filecoin Jul 21, 2020

Today, we’d like to share the latest improvement, updates, and outcomes of Powergate development. It’s been a busy month or two since we last fired off a Powergate update, the TL;DR is that we’ve built a lot, learned a lot, and added a lot of new users. We are taking a slightly new format below compared to previous updates to show off some of the great work happening out in the community around Powergate.

What is Powergate? As a refresher, or if you are new to the Powergate community updates, here's the simplest way to think about the Powergate: An API driven solution to deploy multi-tiered storage based on IPFS and Filecoin into systems and applications. Persist data on Filecoin, ensure availability on IPFS, manage one or many Filecoin addresses with access control, monitor long-term storage deals, use multiple supported clients and libraries, and more!

News and Community 🥳

July has been a great month for community growth already. Many teams have gravitated toward the Powergate localnet and the development speed it offers when you are just starting to build a new app or API. Because of this, many developers have been able to set up and run Powergate easily. Additionally, we’ve had a great response to our offer of Hosted Powergate instances running on Filecoin Testnet. Altogether, we think the community is responding positively to our work, which is fantastic!

Community updates

  • Fleek announced their new Space Daemon, which has taken the first steps at offering Bucket and Thread APIs on the local desktop and shared plans for Powergate support coming soon.
  • Slate, the personal Filecoin storage client, has been cruising along and building a vibrant small community of its own. We’ve seen them develop on new Powergate APIs nearly as fast as we can put them out, which has provided some pretty invaluable feedback as we continue to build.
  • Truffle announced their work on adding Filecoin support. Included in their release is a helpful tool for developers to connect to the Powergate localnet easily. We’re excited to support them wherever they take it next.
  • Aaron, over at Vital Point, shared his work on integrating Near Protocol with Textile Threads. This is a really cool way to make threads more transportable and also to bring in popular user account models. He added some cool hints toward Filecoin/Powergate enhancements in that post.
  • Since HackFS kicked off, we’ve been working long hours, keeping all the teams happily building. Many teams have been using Powergate as well as Textile Hub, Buckets, and Threads. We launched an experimental version of the Textile Hub that integrates Bucket storage with Filecoin Testnet.
  • We’ve been able to see some early HackFS ideas and products already hit the web. Check out the work of PyGate, which is wrapping Powergate into a bunch of exciting Python utilities that will open up many new workflows for users. Or read over Samikshan Bairagya’s outline of his decentralized music jamming network he envisioned on top of Filecoin using Powergate.

What’s up next 🤔

  • A new round of developer documentation.
  • Add user wallet address APIs to Textile Hub.
  • Continue work on scalable Powergate deployment(s).
  • Continued work on core features (e.g., payment channel support).

Sprint Debrief 🍹

Contact 💥

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