Second Round of Filecoin Plus Notaries Elected, 5+ PiB More DataCap Awarded

The Filecoin Plus community recently held elections for notaries for the second time since its launch. Applications to receive Notary status and DataCap grants were due May 25 and were reviewed by the governance team, which includes members of the Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs, as well as highly-engaged members of the community who were not applying to be notaries.

Filecoin Plus promotes storage of valuable data by adding a layer of social trust to the Filecoin network. Trusted clients looking to utilize storage on the network apply to receive DataCap, which can be used to incentivize miners to make storage deals. Notaries are Filecoin Plus community-elected trustees responsible for allocating DataCap to parties storing useful data on the network.

The 21 elected notaries, including 10 re-applicants, are as follows:

Elected notaries will occupy their positions until they run out of DataCap or until the next election, which will be held before the end of the year. Notaries serve as fiduciaries of the Filecoin network, and as a result, they are subject to losing their positions if they misuse their DataCap allocation.

This election cycle, the requirements were changed to allow for at least five notaries in North America, Europe, and China, as opposed to the three notaries assigned to each other geographic region. This was done in response to increased DataCap applications and higher Filecoin Plus community participation in those regions. Election of the first notary in Oceania evinces growing global engagement in Filecoin Plus.

Due to rising demand for resources, a maximum of seven notaries can now operate in each region to meet the expected allocation of DataCap. To date, notaries have awarded approximately 800 tebibytes of DataCap to clients across all regions, and those clients have stored more than 250 tebibytes worth of data with DataCap on the Filecoin network. With this round of notaries, 5.3 pebibytes of new DataCap have been granted, a major increase from the last election cycle, which awarded 1.9 pebibytes of DataCap to notaries. If you would like to see more statistics about the Filecoin Plus community, check out this dashboard.

Missed the election but want to get involved with Filecoin Plus? Join the #fil-plus channel on the public Filecoin Slack; participate in Community Governance calls, which happen every other Tuesday — use the Filecoin Community Events calendar to join or catch the recorded meetings on YouTube; and create and comment on open issues in the Notary Governance repo.

You can also read the recap of our first Filecoin Plus Day, which outlined the basics of the program and drew more than 100 participants, including Filecoin Plus users, project architects, cryptoecon experts, and miners. If you are interested in receiving DataCap to have your storage needs served through Filecoin, you can find a list of active notaries on the Filecoin Plus Registry.