Filecoin tools progress update: 24 February
Summary
This sprint was a mini-sprint, cut in half by our team retreat last week in Denver. Our team retreat still proved a productive venue to workshop ideas, refine our planning, and review progress on our Filecoin mission. We'll share a few of the retreat outputs here on our Blog over the next few days. Our sprint goal for the Filecoin initiative was to finalize the planning of the Fast API in the fil-tools stack. Progress was faster than expected, and we managed to implement the first version of the API, allowing fil-tools users and applications to store data on the Filecoin network and retrieve it directly from the IPFS network ๐๐๐.
Background Links ๐
Next Steps ๐ฟ
- Put the Fast API to work โ the first implementation of an application running on
fil-tools
- Release public query endpoints โ new network endpoints that allow external wallets to query for specific network behaviors.
Sprint Debrief
Focus Areas ๐
- Fast API design and first implementation.
- Fast API gRPC endpoint and CLI
- Move
fil-tools
to Docker Compose for simplified setup. - Enhancements to public indices.

Discussion & Planning Changes ๐ค
- The goal of the Fast API is to make data stored on Filecoin addressable by apps and users. We planned to connect storage on Filecoin to a system of caching, where at the outer most layer, the data was available on the IPFS network and over an HTTP gateway. In the end, this work came together more quickly than expected and will land in Master over the next few days. We'll immediately turn our attention to testing the system in real-world situations.
- The Filecoin testnet still isn't ready to thoroughly test the storage and retrieval of data (required to test the Fast API fully). For the time being, we managed to develop the system on a temporary dev net, but we hope to test this work on the testnet ASAP.
Closed ๐ฅ
The following tickets will all be closed once we merge the Fast API first PR.
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/110
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/89
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/112
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/126
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/127
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/129
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/119
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/120
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/120
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/130
- (pending) https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/121
New Tickets & Questions ๐
- Is there a milestone for testnet associated with end-to-end storage and retrieval testing?
Contact
- Feel free to join the Textile Slack or join our room on the Filecoin Slack.
- If you would like to discuss our work and how it may fit into your own projects, please reach out through email or setup a quick call here.
February Focused on Fantastic FastAPI for @Filecoin! Connecting @IPFSBot content to storage... Find out the Fundamentals here: https://t.co/hLnQp00C5w #progress #dweb #crypto #alliteration pic.twitter.com/lp9GsHgNp4
— Textile (@textileio) February 24, 2020