With core infrastructure components such as the Ethereum Sidechain and cross-chain bridges laid down, and Chainlink oracle integration well underway, development for the next iteration of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) legos has kicked off in the Elastos ecosystem. FilDA, the Elastos community’s debut DeFi project, aims to service the needs of various actors within the Filecoin ecosystem with a suite of specialized DeFi tools.
Filecoin is one of the digital asset space’s most prominent projects, and has recently received attention for both its token launch and underlying distributed storage technology. In Filecoin’s economic model, miners must pledge FIL tokens in order to mine, and must also operate within the parameters of the Filecoin protocol, which do not release mining rewards until 180 days after they are earned. While incentivizing high-integrity behavior, the protocol places tremendous cash flow pressure on miners, who must at once stake FIL and finance their own operations, all while dealing with a 6-month income lag. Using robust DeFi solutions, FilDA connects FIL tokenholders, whose otherwise-inactive holdings can be staked to generate interest, and FIL miners, whose financial constraints can be loosened immensely from intra-ecosystem borrowing opportunities.
By addressing real needs of active ecosystem parties, FilDA stands apart from the pack of experimental DeFi projects that have propagated on the Ethereum network in recent months. FilDA is a real-world application of high-impact DeFi tools that have been tailored to a specific use case in the Filecoin economy – not decentralized gambling.
FilDA will run on both the Ethereum blockchain and Elastos’ Ethereum (ETH) Sidechain in parallel, and will also support ELA lending and mining. As FilDA’s funding has been sourced primarily from the Ethereum community, its technology is being developed first on Ethereum. Fortunately, using Ethereum as a home base provides an excellent opportunity to implement large-scale operations on Elastos’ ETH Sidechain for the first time without taking on major risk. Thus, in the near term, the ELA token and Ethereum Sidechain will garner additional use-cases and contribute tangible value extending beyond the Elastos ecosystem, and attract new users and wealth in the process.
Looking ahead, FilDA’s long-term objective is to couple the high-performance storage capacity of Filecoin miners with Elastos Runtime to create a decentralized, computational environment secured by blockchain. An ambitious initiative of this magnitude will be labor-intensive and require a longer development timeline, but its benefits will be well worth their costs: FilDA will be able to both support the provision of decentralized storage services on Elastos and enhance the value of Filecoin’s network.
Ultimately, FilDA composes a suite of products that facilitate short-term collaboration. In addition to providing lending services to Filecoin miners, FilDA offers interest-generating products to FIL tokenholders, through which they can leverage the value vested in their established holdings. Most important, FilDA does not merely imitate other DeFi projects; rather, it draws on the dynamics intrinsic to Filecoin’s mining algorithm and economic model to provide various ecosystem actors with a means to leverage and grow their wealth, all while employing tools and platforms native to the Elastos ecosystem.
To support FilDA, new features are being developed for Elephant Wallet alongside the formation of the DeFi base protocol, and many of the top Filecoin mining sites have already pledged their support, including Kaiyun and RRmine.
As for the Elastos ecosystem, just as DeFi applications created wealth and sparked development and innovation on Ethereum, Elastos stands to benefit economically and technologically from both the suite of DeFi products and storage solutions FilDA brings to Elastos.
About FilDA Alliance
Established on Oct 20 at the 2020Block Global Eco Summit in Shenzhen, China, the FilDA Alliance was created by Elastos Co-Founder Feng Han to bring together industry giants in the blockchain and IPFS space under the common mission of creating new decentralized financial services.
Current Alliance members include: Zhou Shuoji, founder of FBG Capital, a digital asset investment management fund focusing on the blockchain capital market, and one of the most influential cryptocurrency hedge funds and venture capital funds in China; Shenyu, China’s earliest digital currency pioneer, creator of China’s first and largest comprehensive mining pool-F2Pool and also the co-founder of COBO Custody; Guo Hongcai, Bitcoin angel investor, previously owned the world’s largest Bitcoin (BTC) mining farm. Also, several other attendees and projects are considering joining the alliance.
