1.What do you think about the whole landscape of decentralized storage? What is going on in this space? What does decentralized storage mean to Web3？

Filecoin and arweave are the two famous storage protocols out there in the market. Filecoin has a huge miner network of 18 EB and hundreds of miners lending storage to the market. Whereas, Arweave is mostly known for its permanent storage ability and has been able to build a decent community due to smart contract ability which Filecoin misses at the moment but will soon have with FVM launching early next year. Lighthouse is meant to play an important role with a perpetual storage proposition similar to Arweave but doing it at a cheaper price and providing users with regular verifiable storage proofs which arweave does not provide.

Decentralized storage is the backbone of web3 due to its tamper-proof, verifiable and censorship resistant nature. It’s hard to imagine a NFT project being here long term without the decentralized storage system like IPFS.

2. Although logically storing docs and files in a decentralized way is a fancy and convenient way; few people adopt decentralized storage. What is your view about that?

I think both Filecoin and Arweave have been able to amass more storage than ever before. Filecoin is growing at an exponential rate storing currently over 25 PB of data, though Arweave has been slow to pick up due to high cost of permanent storage but has recently been able to bring in a decent amount of data. Lighthouse making long term storage cheaper and verifiable than arweave boosts that proposition. The right set of tools and interface needs to be there for mass adoption. This is what we are doing at Lighthouse too, with our SDK not just providing the ability to store on dWeb but also do things like encryption, access control, spin up custom dedicated gateways to instantly retrieve files. I think as web3 grows, decentralized storage is going to scale to a scale never seen before, even capturing market share of web2 products.

3. As a part of the Filecoin ecosystem, what is your relationship with Filecoin? How do you regard the Filecoin ecosystem?

Lighthouse brings perpetual storage ability to Filecoin. Filecoin being the number 1 storage protocol in the market right now makes Lighthouse open to a big number of projects, partners and supporters. We have partnered with Filecoin on various hackathons previously and the Filecoin team has supported Lighthouse on all fronts. They even published a blog on Lighthouse recently -

Filecoin ecosystem is growing a lot and we see it everywhere right now. Even during bear markets, I noticed more storage miners joining the Filecoin network. Talking to various stakeholders, I sense a long term vision and optimism for Filecoin aligned.

4. Could you introduce the mechanism to make sure Lighthouse could store files till perpetuity? What's your targeted customer? Do you have any case to prove your solution is usable and efficient?

Lighthouse protocol has a smart contract-based endowment pool whose job is to pay for the users' files till perpetuity. When a user pays for a file, some part of that amount goes directly to store the data on miners whereas the remaining amount goes back to the endowment pool. All files stored through the lighthouse protocol contribute the buffer amount to this common endowment pool which later releases funds to keep paying for the users' file till perpetuity.This endowment pool grows over time using various mechanisms like staking, farming, etc. The accrued fees also goes back to the endowment pool.

Our target customers are web3 projects who want to store their files and data long term and could range anywhere from NFT marketplaces to gaming, metaverse, projects and even enterprises wanting to data privately on the dWeb. Aiverse team and many other projects recently integrated Lighthouse for storing digital assets and access control functionality. We have been seeing more week on week downloads on our sdk and even hundreds of users on Files Dapp.

5.What is a roadmap for Lighthouse? What is your progress so far and what will you do next?

We are building an ecosystem of projects who can leverage the perpetual storage and access control ability of Lighthouse to take web3 to the next level. Many more projects (double digits) have committed to use Lighthouse and we will see more integrations go through soon in coming months. We will also soon announce the date for our testnet and mainnet release that will see our smart contracts going live on chain with the endowment pool functionality which is at the core of Lighthouse. We do have a vision for and taking steps towards making Lighthouse protocol self sustainable and profitable long term with value accrual for stakeholders.

To learn more about Lighthouse, visit the official website, read through the documentation or jump in on Github. You can also join the community on Discord, Twitter, Telegram, or LinkedIn