Launching the Filecoin bridge on NEAR Mainnet with free and scalable storage for developers
Filecoin is joining forces with NEAR to support new growth and experimentation on the web3 stack. Now, a $300,000 fund announced today will provide grants to projects that demonstrate or enable integrations between the Filecoin and NEAR networks. Combining NEAR's low-cost, high-speed blockchain with Filecoin's verifiable, decentralized storage creates exciting opportunities for many new kinds of applications.
To support the initiative, we are accelerating the release of our NEAR~Filecoin bridge on NEAR Mainnet. The first of its kind storage bridge creates a seamless way for NEAR developers, applications, smart contracts, or NFTs to integrate Filecoin-based storage of any form of data. The bridge comes with a simple to use JavaScript SDK that pairs seamlessly with the NEAR JS tools or with a CLI version for developers aiming to deploy assets to IPFS and Filecoin during development.
So, what will data storage cost developers? Surprisingly, nothing.
The NEAR team has supported this initiative through a grant to help offset operation and development costs for the next year of service. While we evolve the system around the emerging Filecoin storage marketplace and new uses-cases built on NEAR, this grant will allow developers to move fast and build the next generation of web technologies.
Storage for an ecosystem of applications
NEAR is a fast, scalable, low-cost blockchain for application developers. It provides a highly intuitive and easy-to-use developer toolkit, making it easy for new developers to go from idea to production fast. NEAR is a layer one blockchain, but through the Rainbow Bridge and Aurora, it also offers scalability to Ethereum apps.
Filecoin is a massive, verifiable, decentralized storage network. The network is less than a year old and is already quickly approaching 10 exabytes of storage capacity. Filecoin offers benefits to developers that have never existed in storage systems previously, including diversity of storage locations cryptographic guarantees of storage, decentralized provider network and marketplace, and more. Those benefits combined with the network's growth momentum have created a fantastic environment for innovation.
The NEAR~Filecoin bridge offers the scalable storage of Filecoin to the ecosystem of applications on NEAR controlled through permissionless smart contracts. This novel configuration gives developers and their application users permissionless access to storage, no accounts or API keys required.
NEAR~Filecoin Storage on Mainnet
To support the $300,000 initiative from Filecoin & NEAR, we are moving our NEAR~Filecoin storage bridge to Mainnet. The bridge has been running for over a month on Testnet where we have collected valuable early data on the operation and scaling of the system. We've seen thousands of files stored successfully over the bridge to date. Today, we are announcing that we will pilot the storage bridge on Mainnet on Tuesday, August 17 at 12:00 PST.
All projects build using the NEAR~Filecoin bridge will be eligible for the $300,000 funding offered by the grants initiative. If you want to learn more about how to use the bridge visit, https://near.storage.