General

Helpful reference materials for the Filecoin specification, implementations, and ecosystem.

About Filecoin

• Filecoin Specification - technical specification for Filecoin protocol and its associated subsystems.

• Filecoin Slack - announcements and open discussion of Filecoin.

• Filecoin Orbit Community Program - the Filecoin Orbit Community Program is an effort of dozens of volunteers around the world to organize meetups and hackathons in their local jurisdictions.

• Filecoin YouTube channel - various Filecoin workshops, conference talks, and meetups.

Filecoin Network

Node implementations

• Lotus - Recommended most advanced implementation and security audited, in GoLang.

• Other implementations:

  • Venus - also in GoLang (Venus documentation).

  • Forest - Rust.

• Lotus Docker Hub Images (unofficial):

  • glif/lotus

Networks

network.filecoin.io - lists all current Filecoin networks and related information.

• Mainnet

  • Mainnet network status - reports the status and incident of the Filecoin Mainnet.

• Calibration

  • Largest testnet which support 32 GiB and 64 GiB sectors.

  • See #fil-net-calibration-discuss for questions and discussion in Filecoin Slack.

• Local Devnet

  • Run a Local Devnet using Lotus.

Network status

Tools to check status and details of the network and chain.

Block explorers

• Filfox.info - Mainnet

• Filscan - Mainnet & Calibration

Chain data and monitoring

• Starboard - network health monitoring

• Sentinel Project - Filecoin Network Monitoring and Analysis System

• DataCapStats - data providing insight on the Filecoin Plus program.

Storage/Deals status

• Starboard - Filecoin storage provider analytics

• filecoin.tools - check your CID’s storage deal status. Also provides an API - check filecoin.tools/docs for reference

• Deals list at Filfox.io

Storage Onramps

Web-based applications that store your data on Filecoin. No command-line or coding experience required.

• Lighthouse "offers permanent, decentralized storage powered by Filecoin. Secure, scalable, and ideal for individuals, developers, and enterprises."

• Storacha is an open hot storage network scales IPFS and Filecoin. Upload any data and Storacha will ensure it ends up on a decentralized set of IPFS and Filecoin storage providers. There Storacha docs detail the JavaScript and Go API libraries, and there is a no-code web uploader available as well.

• Singularity "facilitates onboarding of large quantaties of data (PB-scale) to the Filecoin network in an efficient, secure, and flexible way."

• CID Gravity is a "seamless gateway to the decentralized web", allowing you to drag and drop files through an easy-to-use UI that uploads files to Filecoin and IPFS.

• Ramo is "a network coordinating people, hardware and capital to build a more open and resilient internet infrastructure for everyone."

• Starling Framework for Data Integrity

  • to securely capture, store and verify human history

  • learn more at starlinglab.org/78days or the Filecoin blog interview

  • Starlingstorage.io - API + CLI that simplified storing data to a local Lotus node for preservation use cases.

APIs & Developer tools

Developer tools, API clients & storage services that developers can use to build on Filecoin.

Storage APIs for app builders

• Lighthouse - Lighthouse offers a suite of tools to enable builders to store data on Filecoin when building apps.

• Fleek’s tools - provides access to Fleek’s hosted services using IPFS, Filecoin, Ethereum, etc.

• Akave is "revolutionizing data management with a decentralized, modular solution that combines the robust storage of Filecoin with cutting-edge encryption and easy-to-use interfaces."

Message signing tools

• Filecoin Signing Tools - Recommended a pure JS or Rust / WASM / JSONRPC library for creating signed messages apart from a Filecoin node.

  • For an open source example of how to use it see the Glif web wallet on GitHub.

• Filecoin JS Signer - [last update: June 2021] pure TS / JS library for creating signed messages and interacting with Filecoin’s built-in Actors (like Payment Channel and Multisig), used by the Filecoin Loans grant project.

  • On npm at @blitslabs/filecoin-js-signer

Wallet-related tools

• FilSnap MetaMask Plugin - MetaMask has a new plugin system currently still in beta that developers can try out. The MM UI will not change but Filecoin keys are in the MM vault.

Node Infrastructure & APIs

NOTE: making deep calls into the chain’s history may take some time to return and it may be more efficient to use a chain database (e.g. used by block explorers) that stores the chain’s history and is optimized for queries.

• GLIF nodes - A hosted endpoint to Filecoin mainnet and testnet. Note: as of Q1 2023, Infura no longer supports Filecoin.

  • The GLIF endpoint supports read-only calls and MPoolPush() for sending signed transactions to the network (which can be signed using the Message signing tools).

• Lotus JSON-RPC API - Lotus offers the full feature set of its capabilities through API.

  • lotus API Postman sample - (shows sample wallet calls only)

Scalable endpoint hosting

For running a node cluster of load balanced Lotus JSON RPC API endpoints.

• Filecoin-chart (k8 cluster) - Helm chart for hosting Lotus Node clients.

Filecoin API clients

• Filecoin.js (outdated) - higher-level JS library for interacting with Lotus via JSON-RPC API.

• js-lotus-client - lower-level JS wrapper for basic parsing of the Lotus JSON RPC API.

• lotus-json-rpc-provider (outdated) - wraps the Lotus API in TypeScript.

Storage provider index API

• Filrep.io API - A suite of RESTFul JSON endpoints to discover the best storage provider to make deals with.

Data prep tools

• CAR files - automatically used on Lotus import for less than 32 and 64 GiB, Filecoin archive format serialized from DAGs, see also building with the Lotus API.

• go-graphsplit - FileDrive chunks a larger single DAG for storage in default Filecoin 32 and 64 GiB sector sizes.

• IPFS - you can use ipfs add with an IPFS node then add the CID from a Filecoin node.

Databases using IPFS and Filecoin

• Tableland - (new) create familiar SQL tables to read and write dynamic NFT metadata or application data for dApps, from Textile.

• OrbitDB - decentralized multi-party database on IPFS with multi-party syncing with topic pubsub and CRDTs.

• ThreadsDB - decentralized multi-party database for user-siloed data on IPFS, from Textile.

Other developer tools

• js-rle - RLE+ Spec. Learn about rle-bitset-encoding in the Filecoin Spec.

• Truffle for Filecoin - building apps to preserve files to IPFS and Filecoin.

Storage providers

Storage provider reputation systems

• Filrep.io - Index of online storage providers and their pricing, ranked by power and reputation score.

• SpaceGap - shows storage proof deadlines and sector details for the top 50 storage providers.

Storage provider tools

• Lotus Farcaster - Prometheus, Grafana and Python monitoring dashboard.

Storage client and miner programs

• Filecoin Plus Verified Data Program

  • Incentivizes valuable data stored on Filecoin with a social trust network for verified data.

  • Clients can apply to allocators to receive DataCap and incentivize storage providers at 10x to their quality-adjusted power, increasing probability of block rewards.

Ecosystem

• Filecoin Ecosystem - explore the hundreds of projects in the Filecoin ecosystem using Filecoin Foundation's "Ecosystem Explorer."

• Upcoming Hackathons - keep a lookout for upcoming hackathons!

• Events - attend a Filecoin event to engage with other ecosystem members.

Grants and accelerators

• Filecoin Developer Grants - ongoing monthly developer grant program to support open source projects and new Open Grants on Filecoin.

Was this page helpful?