AMA Recap of Folderlabs &Crypto Legacy
We held AMA from 25th June, Friday from Crypto Legacy community:)
Below is the full AMA recap, we hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoyed answering your questions!
- Introduction questions
Q: Can you provide a brief introduction about the Folderlabs team?
A: Hello, this is Sara from Folderlabs. I work as a marketing manager with our CTO, Nagu Thogiti.
To briefly introduce introduce our CTO, Nagu, I had designed and developed blockchain protocols and dapps with heavy focus on the protocols security engineering and IPFS ecosystem before joining Folderlabs. I have a long experience of creating enterprise scale platforms and applications in the fields of AI, big data, FinTech, and blockchain with more than 20 years of experience and professional accreditations from MIT. From education wise, I am a mathematician and computer scientist with cryptography and AI as specialties. I have been doing a lot of privacy preserving AI projects in the non-blockchain professional world helping healthcare and fintech companies do data intensive privacy preserving computational projects.
Q: Where does the name Folderlabs come from and what services does this platform offer?
A:The Folder Protocol is designed to be a layer-2 solution for decentralized storage protocols such as Filecoin-an incentive layer on top of IPFS, the advanced version of IPFS ecosystem, which can provide storage infrastructure for any data. It is especially useful for decentralizing and building data, running distributed applications and implementing heavy data smart contracts at enterprise scale and performance.
The earliest version of the project was primarily focusing on developing on top Filecoin layer 1 protocol. We were thinking of Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon AWS versions of storage solutions in blockchain space. This is where our brand name, Folder Protocol is derived from.
Q: What is that milestone at Folderlabs that you are most proud to achieve?
A: Though the covid situation kind of completely disrupted our lives, we are making a great progress in launching the Folder’s first NFT + DeFi platform to enable NFT assets and decentralized finance in one unified platform. Our future roadmap for this platform also enables us to integrate with other NFT blockchains and use one single platform for all your NFT needs and transactions. We are also building a decentralized storage option for all NFT data and metadata through Folder NFT+DeFi platform.
Q:What plans does Folderlabs have for this 2021?
A: We are scheduled to kick start the design and development of the core Folder network and protocol. We’ve been quite busy with exchange listings and meeting all of their requirements. On top of that we will be launching Folder NFT+DeFi platform with decentralized storage option for NFT data and metadata. We are planning to add additional integrations more blockchains for the Folder. A lot of exciting things in 2021 and the early 2022.
2. Twitter Questions
Q:How does Folder Protocol plan to take advantage of this peak of interest in NFTs & DeFi?
A: Folderlabs is having some big news coming in next 1–2 weeks as we currently testing the Folder NFT+DeFi platform and making it easy for people to join the NFT and DeFi movement with seamless user experience, bringing in your own assets to tokenize through NFT, mint, create auctions, stake, etc. Please watch our telegram community and website for more details. This is the first NFT + DeFi platform to enable NFT assets and decentralized finance in one unified platform through decentralized storage of NFT data and metadata. Our future roadmap for this platform also enables us to integrate with other NFT blockchains and use one single platform for all your NFT needs and transactions.
Q:Can you elaborate on the upcoming milestones of your roadmap and what can we be excited about regarding the roadmap?
A: Folderlabs is currently doing necessary R&D to correctly select the parameters needed for our core algorithms that will drive scalability and performance for decentralized storage. We have made much progress in experimenting with several technical specifications on how to bring enterprise scale performance and latency to the current state IPFS problems. We are working some specific implementations around IPFS virtualized Gateway networks. These are special IPFS gateway networks that have some special mathematical properties like highly and densely connected graph networks. Our whitepaper was updated to describe some high-level overview of the protocol and its specifications.
We are aggressively rolling into the next milestone of developing and implementing some of the ideas from our technical specifications sessions.
Q:Why is it essential to have #Folderlabs in our lives today? Why would our life and operations be more practical?
A: Hardware like your harddrives, USB drives, or network attached storage devices are used for storing digital files. Like you store physical stuff in a closet or storage room. In these cases, you are the owner, you are the authority. Then when cloud computing trend started, big players like amazon and google had revolutionized how you store and access digital files. It originally started with photos and videos or any media files but eventually spread to all digital files including how you save code, databases, knowledge, etc. Today, these cloud-based storage services dominate any digital data access. But, the trust and authority in the system were outsourced to Amazon/Google/etc. so that you get faster or cheaper storage options. Today, practically every startup launched their app or platform using one of these cloud computing services . In essence, we gave away privacy, security and ownership of our data and assets to Google/Amazon/etc.,
There were no guarantees from these companies that they would secure your data, or keep your data private. We have multiple data breaches at massive scales (Equifax, facebook, etc.). There are multiple factors with these loss of data, security breaches, privacy issues, but at the end we lost control of ownership and we have no way to bring change.
Decentralized storage is a solution to reverse this trend and put the ownership back in the users. You probably remembered the old days of napster, limewire, etc. where peer to peer file sharing services were popular. Decentralized storage is one way an extension of these p2p data sharing but with more advanced mathematical structure and backed by Cryptography methods to give the authority back to the user. So that you are less reliant on big centralized silos like Google/Amazon.
Q:What does the Folder protocol allow buyers and sellers? There will be advantages, what advantages will customers have?
A: I think this question is asking native token economy utility of FOL.
Here are some token utility that we are designing for:
- Token Burn/ Revenue Share
- Discount on trading fees on the Folder Products/Services Platform
- Collateral
- Socialized Gains
- Leveraged Token Listing Fees
- White Label Solutions
- Future Expansion
- Increased referral rates on the Folder products/Services Platform
- Bonus votes
- Increased airdrop rewards
- Waived blockchain fees
Besides the Folder Network will provide a decentralized storage option for companies and developers looking for enterprise scale performance and low-latency on blockchain storage. Folder will be very useful for data intensive blockchain applications.
Q: Your review explains that Folder Protocol (FOL), offers the process of decentralizing data through the folder protocol, does this mean that it adapts to the needs of the user? If so, how?
A: We will see more tools and solutions that will make it easier to use decentralized storage for all types of users. More interfaces to the decentralized storage. But I believe, we need a much longer time to replace the current trend of centralized storage in the real world. There is also huge factor with mindset here. I think the past 1–2 generations of developers, entrepreneurs, etc. are used to thinking in centralized silos. This mindset needs to change. We need to care more about data ownership, security, privacy of the user and the ecosystem in which these applications are deployed. We need a movement to make real progress.
