Re:Protocol Labs is laying off 21% of staff (89 people)
by acdha on Saturday February 04, 2023 @01:51PM
(#34656946)
Do you have any figures on real usage? Neither seem to have much traction and with interest rates rising I’d expect investors are putting more pressure on them to demonstrate real profits rather than the paper valuations which have characterized web3 so far. The biggest thing I’d expect to see for IPFS is profitably selling storage at competitive prices. If you can’t match S3 or Dropbox it’s unclear what market they could possibly have to justify even the reduced headcount.
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Re:Protocol Labs is laying off 21% of staff (89 people)
by wuiheerfoj on Saturday February 04, 2023 @04:29PM
(#34658512)
IPFS is an open protocol à la BitTorrent and not about selling storage; Filecoin is about selling storage.
There are S3/Dropbox-like solutions on top of Filecoin. I’ve not deeply researched the economics of them, but some of them have competitive or better prices
Re:Protocol Labs is laying off 21% of staff (89 people)
by acdha on Saturday February 04, 2023 @04:45PM
(#34658707)
Yes, I’m aware of what IPFS is - the point being that it’s been around for 8 years but seems to have rather little impact. For a company which has raised a quarter of a billion in real dollars and has a coin ostensibly valued over $2B, you’d expect to see some serious ongoing revenue from people paying for services because they do something better than the alternatives.
When you look at services using IPFS, be sure to look for hard statements about reliability. One of the recurring weird aspects about IPFS is that people talk like it guarantees durable storage without needing to pay for redundant copies.