This week our contributor analysts cover Web3: Filecoin, The Graph, Pocket Network, Gitcoin.

• Filecoin is a decentralized layer-1 protocol that allows anyone to provide verifiable storage and adjacent services. One can think of Filecoin as an Airbnb for cloud storage. Since its launch, Filecoin has reached 10EiB in capacity, more than 3000 storage providers & 10,000 developers building applications on Filecoin. The active usage of the protocol has generated more than $1.4B in protocol revenue. Filecoin is also the largest zk-SNARK network and recently had a 10-25x scalability improvement.

• More than 106M FIL ($8.5B) are locked as collateral. In the context of Filecoin, collateral ensures both consensus security and storage reliability. More than 50PiB of storage is added every day with an additional 300,000 FIL locked.

  

• While Filecoin is not just about cost, Filecoin storage providers are offering competitive prices. It’s estimated at 0.04% of Amazon S3 and many are offering FREE storage for Filecoin Plus deals. Currently, there are 25PiB of deals on Filecoin. Many providers are building new and differentiated experiences.

• Curators signal on subgraphs they deem high-quality, so Indexers prioritize the best APIs. The Sushi Exchange subgraph has ~8% of curation signal, followed by Livepeer, Audius, and UMA with ~6% of total signal each. Synthetix, Opyn, Reflexer, PoolTogether, and Curve are also highly signaled subgraphs.

• Developers create API keys to query subgraphs and pay for the usage. API key creation has grown ~195% over the last 2 months as Dapps have been migrating their subgraphs from the hosted service to The Graph Network to ensure Dapps are decentralized. 50+ unique API keys are used daily in Web3 today!

• Indexers are allocating to the subgraphs they want to serve to earn indexing rewards. Over 43M GRT in rewards has been earned for processing queries for the top 10 subgraphs, growing ~147% since late June. The UMA voting subgraph leads with the most rewards followed by PoolTogether, mStable, and DODO.

• Come September 8th, Gitcoin will be kicking off Round 11 with an estimated matching pool of $900,000 to be quadratically dispersed across nearly 2,000 grants on the platform. Funding for this round will represent a $200,000 increase over the amount available for open-sourced projects in the previous quarter. Since our last coverage, the number of monthly active developers has nearly doubled to 311,688 and total open source funding across the platform has jumped over $9M from $20.7M to $29.98M.

• Over the last 10 rounds, not only has Gitcoin seen increases across the size of the matching pool, but also in the number of contributors, contributions, and the overall amount contributed. In the most recent round, 14,658 contributors made 308,658 contributions that amounted to over $1.1M in project funding.

• Through their use of a quadratic funding, Gitcoin encourages smaller donations and is the main reason why the median contribution is only $1.21. While this individual amount is small, successful grants with more than 5K contributors have the opportunity to receive over $40K in matching funds.

• Pocket Network has seen strong growth in the average number of daily relays. The network saw a historical average of ~4.5M requests a day pre-August. Now the network is printing an all-time-high of ~41M average daily relays. Key drivers for relays have been demand from Dark Forest players and Austin Griffith's scaffold.eth tooling for solidity developers.

• Pocket Network is equally seeing healthy growth in active validator nodes who serve Pocket’s integrated applications. The drop in late June was likely driven by a reduction in relays (and therefore node rewards) and demonstrates that capacity changes dynamically according to network demand.

• Pocket’s recent integrations of other chains has lead to an increasing diversification in which traction is being sourced including Fuse and xDAI. Ethereum mainnet remains the dominant source of relays today (80% market share) but it is reasonable to see the chain’s dominance decline over time.