Verified Clients

Verified Clients

As described earlier, verified clients as a construction make the Filecoin Economy more robust and valuable. While a storage miner may choose to forgo deal payments and self-deal to fill their storage and earn block rewards, this is not as valuable to the economy and should not be heavily subsidized. However, in practice, it is impossible to tell useful data apart from encrypted zeros. Introducing verified clients pragmatically solves this problem through social trust and validation. There will be a simple and open verification process to become a verified client; this process should attract clients who will bring real storage demand to the Filecoin Economy.

Verifiers should eventually form a decentralized, globally distributed network of entities that confirms the useful storage demand of verified clients. If a verifier evaluates and affirms a client’s demand to have real data stored, that client will be able to add up to a certain amount of data to the network as verified client deals; this limit is called a DataCap allocation. Verified clients can request an increased DataCap once they have used their full allocation and Verifiers should perform some due diligence to ensure that the clients are not maliciously exploiting verification. The verification process will evolve over time to become more efficient, decentralized, and robust.

Storage demand on the network will shape the storage offering provided by miners. With the ability to deploy data with a greater sector quality multiplier, verified clients play an even more important role in shaping the quality of service, geographic distribution, degree of decentralization, and consensus security of the network. Verifiers and verified clients must be cognizant of the value and responsibility that come with their role. Additionally, it is conceivable for miners to have a business development team to source valuable and useful datasets in the world, growing demand for the storage they provide. Teams would be incentivized to help their clients through the verification process and start storing data on the Filecoin Network, in addition to providing their clients with strong SLAs.