Filecoin has announced an integration with Chainlink to offer advanced decentralized storage solutions to Web 3.0 developers.
Filecoin is the world’s largest open-source decentralized storage network, and this integration will enable the bidirectional connection between its network and blockchains that support smart contracts, such as Ethereum. This will provide developers with a complete Web 3.0 infrastructure stack, consisting of blockchain tech for on-chain logic and state changes, Chainlink oracles for off-chain communication and computation, and Filecoin for storage.
Furthermore, by using Chainlink to link cryptographically proven data stored on Filecoin to external smart contract systems, such integration enables bidirectional smart contract capabilities that were previously impossible to achieve.
Some use cases being explored are for example Filecoin Miner Insurance, where Chainlink oracles can monitor the status of Filecoin miners and alert a special insurance smart contract if someone goes offline, or so-called DataDAOs, i.e. a DAO holding data sets such as historical prices or data from searches.
It will also be possible to implement Data Bounties, whereby smart contracts will only be able to request certain data sets paid for when the same data set is verifiably verified on Filecoin.
The benefits of integrating Filecoin with Chainlink
DeFi protocols could also benefit from this, since by using Filecoin, Chainlink can enable the long-term economic storage of a large amount of data from e.g. the financial market. In addition, it will also be possible to set up smart contracts to automatically store certain types of data on Filecoin at predetermined intervals, thus creating tamper-proof databases.
In fact, Chainlink, thanks to this integration, opens up bi-directional communication to Filecoin, i.e. allowing both the reading of data from Filecoin and the receiving of external inputs that trigger storage functions.
This is made possible by the development of customized Chainlink external adapters. Initially, there will be one developed to allow Chainlink oracles to read storage status on Filecoin, and that in the future it can be combined with other adapters to write that data to other networks.