Sunsetting the Auction API

We launched the Auction API in early 2021 with a few specific goals in mind:

• Simplify storage provider discovery on the network.
• Ease and stabilize the deal-making flow.
• Induce storage provider competition by making service quality discoverable.

The project was a great success. Many of the learnings have now become standard on the Filecoin network. While the technical innovations will remain open-source and free to use, we will be sunsetting the centralized API as of today.

What this means for developers:

The Auction API bundled a handful of valuable innovations and a simplified API connecting clients with storage providers. The system was built for a Filecoin network two years ago, not for the current network.

Take, for example, data transfer. One of the key ideas in the Auctions API was to ditch “graph sync” and provide HTTP transfer out of the box. This reduced error rates during the deal flow and simplified the job of both storage providers and clients. Since the launch of Filecoin Boost that feature is now standard on the network. This is one of many simple innovations we were proud to push forward and have available across the network.

The good news is that for developers, there isn’t a lot that needs to change now that we’re sunsetting the centralized Auctions API. Many of the features are already available in core tools, and all API clients have been aware of this impending sunset for some time now, so they already have alternatives ready and working.

If you were looking into auctions, we do recommend you continue your Filecoin onboarding journey by exploring Estuary, Web3.Storage, and NFT.Storage.

For storage providers, bidbot will stop receiving new deals. Providers will likely want to stop running these nodes today. If you are running bidbot, we encourage you to checkout the ♠️(SPADE) project. Its onboarding system is almost complete and likely to be open in the next few weeks. If you are interested, contact @ribasushi - PLFD on the Filecoin Slack.

Looking back on Auctions

It was only a year ago that we concluded our first auction competition. Over the lifetime of auctions, the API pushed 150,000 deals to the network and over 4.5 PiB of data! Along the way, the network sent deals to over 100 different storage providers.

We also built some cool technology. You can check that out in the go-auctions-client, broker-core, and bidbot.