<ul><li>All teams need to submit an application</li><li>PL team will conduct interview with the top teams</li><li>2 teams will be selected to proceed with building proposed products</li></ul>

Proposal

<p>This milestone includes delivering the full product that your team defined in milestone 1</p>

Product delivery

<p>This milestone is judged based on your product achieving the usage targets defined below.</p>

Achieving product usage targets

<p>Teams that receive rewards for milestone 3 are expected to continue running the service for at least 1 year after the product usage targets are met. If you continue maintaining the service, fixing bugs, and improving the product up to the standards of the judging team, you will receive an additional grant at the end of this maintenance period.</p>

Ongoing support, maintenance, and product growth

<ul><li>Many Filecoin storage providers <strong>do not serve retrievals or deprioritize serving retrievals</strong> if those compete with other processes (e.g., WindowPost, mining CC sectors)</li><li>Reasons</li><li class="ql-indent-2">No protocol level incentive (reward or punishment) for serving or not serving retrievals</li><li class="ql-indent-1">No punishment for not servicing retrievals either on a protocol or any other levels (e.g., no reputation consequences as described below)</li><li class="ql-indent-1">In the long term, we will have an established retrieval provider market that will ensure retrievals from Filecoin are served. However, the timeline on standing it up is 12-18 months and we need a reliable incentive mechanism for Storage providers to serve retrievals in the near / medium term</li><li>Overall, many <strong>critical aspects of Storage provider behavior are not being </strong>exposed to clients to account for when selecting storage providers, particularly as it relates to:</li></ul><ol><li class="ql-indent-1"><strong>Serving retrievals: </strong>e.g., % of retrieval requests accepted is not available to clients. As a result, clients may not know in advance that if they select this storage provider, it may be difficult to retrieve their data down the road. The effect of not showing this is that there is no punishment to Storage Providers (”SPs”) for failing to provide retrievals neither on protocol nor on a reputational level</li><li class="ql-indent-1"><strong>Providing quality storage service</strong>: e.g., many metrics that are important for the overall storage experience such as SP responsiveness in the storage process, assistance with data transfer, processing, are not recorded / gathered systematically to be shared with other potential clients</li></ol><ul><li class="ql-indent-1">Storage provider discovery is an <strong>opaque and manual process today</strong>There<strong> is no forum for clients to discover storage providers, </strong>they usually need to resort to either initiating contacts via Slack channels or reaching out to the Protocol Labs team for recommendations</li><li class="ql-indent-1">There is no public space where clients can <strong>publicly share their experience with certain storage providers</strong> with other clients. This could lead to certain SPs being less motivated to strive to consistently provide great customer service</li><li class="ql-indent-1">As a result, new, smaller storage providers, or those that are not as active in public channels or familiar / connected to the PL team, are often overlooked in the storage provider discovery process</li><li>Each client has <strong>specific selection criteria</strong> (e.g., some organizations care to partner only with green power providers, while others strive to achieve geographic diversification), but there is no tool that helps to inform clients what criteria each SP satisfies</li></ul><h2>Our vision for the solution</h2><ul><li>We believe that creating a Storage provider discovery tool that brings transparency into SP landscape will help promote good behavior among storage providers</li><li>The vision for the tool is to play a similar role as Airbnb does in the hospitality industry or Yelp in the restaurants industry - a discovery platform and a marketplace that allows storage clients to leave reviews on storage providers, filter and search providers by certain criteria, learn more about their businesses, and get reliable information on the quality of service they provided in the past</li></ul><h2>Desired outcomes</h2><ul><li>There is a reputation cost / consequences for SPs for not serving clients well (e.g., being unresponsive, not serving retrievals) so that:</li><li class="ql-indent-1">Storage providers provide better customer service and serve retrievals more consistently (retrievals success rate for the SP using the product of 95%+)</li><li class="ql-indent-1">Clients are happier with the service they receive from SPs</li><li>Storage providers have a better opportunity to advertise themselves to clients and to reach broader audiences</li><li>It is easy for clients to discover quality SP that fit their needs</li></ul><h2>Existing solutions</h2><ul><li><a href="http://Filrep.io" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Filrep.io</a> contains key stats on SPs but has very low adoption among clients (no known clients are using the tool for SP discovery and selection), most likely due to the fact that it’s missing key characteristics clients need when looking for SPs, such as onboarding speed as well as SP contact information</li><li><a href="http://filgram.filmine.io" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Filgram</a> is a newly launched tool that also does not contain some key SP characteristics that clients will be looking for such as 1. available capacity for Fil+ deals (both from the collateral and storage standpoints). 2. onboarding speeds (data transfer bandwidth and sealing speed) 3. experience / existing setup with onboarding products such as Textile / Estuary</li><li><a href="https://sprd.starboard.ventures/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Starboard tool</a> is also a newly launched tool that contains on-chain data stats but does not contain user generated data on previous SP &lt;&gt; client interactions</li></ul><h2>Target users</h2><ul><li><strong>Storage clients: </strong>medium to large data client (100TiB+ of data)</li><li><strong>Storage providers:</strong> any storage providers that are open for taking on new clients</li></ul>

A platform that allows Filecoin storage providers to advertise their businesses and lets storage clients discover SPs that fit their needs

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