Why Reputation Systems Matter
A key factor in the success of vibrant economic networks is their ability to foster trust among participants and emergence of diverse activities. People need to know that their counterparties are trustworthy before entering into transactions. Reputation systems collect data and feedback on participants’ past and present behaviors, while rewarding participants for more desirable actions taken. By incentivizing a diverse set of good behaviors, reputation systems elevate the reputation of the economic network as a whole.
As the Filecoin Network continues to grow, Starboard developed a Storage Provider Reputation Dashboard (SPRD) to set up behavioral guidelines and reputation metrics for storage providers (SPs). SPRD evaluates and ranks SP behaviors in order to maintain and promote the collective brand of Filecoin. SPRD combines reliable data sources (on-chain and off-chain), insightful storage provider analytics, and a user-friendly interface to keep people well-informed of their counterparties and pave the way for vibrant marketplaces on the Filecoin ecosystem to emerge.
About SPRD
The key benefits of SPRD include:
Empowering clients and ecosystem partners to make more informed decisions in selecting storage providers for storage and retrieval deals;
Enabling Filecoin financial service providers and clients to better identify the credit and financial risks of each storage provider, bringing a more transparent and efficient financial market within the Filecoin ecosystem;
Acting as an identity system for the network, as well as a key index to facilitate storage and retrieval markets.
The primary product interface is a set of dashboards that provide both micro-level SP information as well as macro-level insights on network service quality across five key domains:
Capital & Size
Capacity Growth;
Storage Reliability;
Gas Efficiency;
Deals & Retrieval.
Users can browse SPs based on default rankings or customize the criteria to rank SPs in their preferred orders. Users can also search or click to view individual SP’s reputation information in detail, and compare the selected SP with another SP or the network average.
From Metrics to Reputation
SPRD aims to provide reliable, insightful, objective, and comprehensive SP analytics that support various user needs and multiple use cases. By defining key metrics, different users may assign different weights to different metrics and compose them in different ways to serve their own use cases. Here are the details of the five key metrics that SPRD evaluates SPs on:
Capital & Size: Focuses on an SP’s storage capacity, locked capital, and on-chain financials. The Capital & Size score is weighted and calculated from these sub-metrics:
Capital: sum of initial pledge and locked funds;
Size: quality adjusted storage capacity.
2. Capacity Growth: Measures how quickly storage providers are onboarding new storage capacity and committing new resources to the Filecoin Network. Currently, this metric mainly focuses on the change in quality adjusted storage capacity of individual SPs in the past 7 days. In addition, this section also provides information pertaining to:
the capacity growth of the entire network in the past 7 days;
new initial pledge added to the network in the past 7 days
expected token demand for network initial pledge increment in the next 7 days
The above information can foster a lending market by matching investors with idle FIL capital and fast growing SPs, which reduce financial burdens of SPs and unblock faster storage onboarding. It allows more people to share the growth of the Filecoin Network as well.
3. Storage Reliability: Focuses on an SP’s reliability in their storage services. The score is weighted and calculated by these three sub-metrics:
Sector Termination Rate: Percentage of sectors that were terminated from total sectors;
Sector Recovery Rate: Percentage of sectors that were recovered from faulted sectors;
Sector Recovery Speed: Speed at which an SP recovers its faulted sectors.
4. Gas Efficiency: Looks at an SP’s gas usage for onboarding and maintaining storage (WindowPoSt). A more sophisticated SP should have better software and technology to optimize gas usage in onboarding storage capacity and verifying storage services. This metric is weighted and calculated by two sub-indicators:
Sealing efficiency: average gas used in sealing sectors;
WindowPoSt efficiency: average gas used in maintaining storage capacity.
5. Deals & Retrieval: Measures an SP’s Filecoin Plus storage adoption and its service quality. As the Filecoin Network evolves, more valuable and useful data will be stored on the network, and the service quality of storage and retrieval will be increasingly important metrics to evaluate an SP. For now, this metric mainly focuses on FIL+ deal volume. In the future, an SP’s service quality, response time, service fulfilment rate, retrieval speed, and client feedback n received will also be taken into account for a more comprehensive evaluation.
Practical Use Cases of SPRD
SPRD aims to provide comprehensive SP information to meet various user needs and multiple use cases, including but not limited to:
Clients and ecosystem partners can use the dashboard to select SPs with the most reliable service quality to store their data;
SPs can use the reputation metrics as a guide to improve their on-chain behavior and service quality, in order to stand out in the rankings;
Smaller SPs can identify their key differentiating features and market themselves by standing out in some sub-rankings;
Financial service providers and Web3 storage investors can use the dashboard to select high quality SPs to invest in or provide funding for;
Application developers can use the dashboard to provide tiered services to SPs with different rankings;
Filecoin analysts can use the dashboard and data source to conduct further research and analysis on Filecoin SP behaviors.
Future Roadmap of SPRD
SPRD aims to provide the most comprehensive reputation metrics for users to assess Filecoin storage providers according to their needs. In future iterations of SPRD, we will try to incorporate the below features:
Conducting further research on SP behaviors and add additional metrics for reputation evaluation, especially in the Deals & Retrieval section.
Allowing users to customize composite reputation scores by assigning their own weights to different metrics.
Providing off-chain reputation data such as geographic information, response time, client feedback, deal success rate, etc.
Allowing users to filter storage providers by region, storage capacity, on-chain capital, capacity growth rate, storage reliability, Filecoin Plus adoption, service quality, etc.
In addition to being a hub for SP analytics and discovery, SPRD also strives to become a marketplace for Web3 data services and an intermediary for financial services. Therefore, in the medium to long term, SPRD will aim to incorporate deal-making and retrieval functions to serve as an interface for easier access to Filecoin services.
Visit SPRD here and let us know your feedback by contacting us on Twitter or through info@starboard.ventures.
We will collect feedback and suggestions from all parties to improve and refine the product. It is encouraged for anyone to leave comments!
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