FilCDN Business model and Value Flow

In this document we will analyse the FilCDN business model and flow of funds.

High Level Flow

1. An FWS client add funds to FWS and sets a spending limit (per service?)

2. Service providers can trigger payouts per period based on their service. Space Meridian will report egress metrics on chain and trigger payouts based on these.

3. FilCDN has a FIL wallet that will gain funds.

4. FilCDN has to pay Cloudflare bills for the egress served for clients.

5. FilCDN pays SPs for serving retrievals on cache miss.

6. The on chain gains must be more that the outgoing Cloudflare bills and cache miss payments.

graph TD
  Client --> |add funds| FWSF["FWS funds"]
  FWSF --> |revenue for PDP| SP
  FWSF --> |revenue for CDN| FilCDN
  FilCDN --> |revenue for cache misses| SP
  FilCDN --> |infra bills| Cloudflare

Observations

1. In this model, SPs will earn for serving retrievals to the CDN layer. This means we do not need to rely on SPs to serve retrievals altruistically.

2. By requiring FilCDN to pay per byte for egress, FilCDN is incentivised to have the best possible caching strategies in place, and this is where content addressing will be really useful. If 100 clients are all storing the Twitter icon for their website, we can store on copy in our cache and deduplicate on both storage and on cache miss requests, thus saving tons of egress and storage.

Trust Model

For PDP, there is verifiability that SPs have stored the data via the PDP proving mechanism. SPs are able to trigger payouts based on this. For FilCDN, there is more trust required that FilCDN has accelerated the content as there is no proof of egress.

If FilCDN pays the SPs directly per byte for retrievals/egress, then we do not need to trust the SPs to serve egress altruistcally.

Questions

1. Does an FWS client add a spending limit per service or as a whole?

2. Can the proving periods used by PDP and filCDN be different?