Markets

Markets in Filecoin

The Filecoin project is a protocol, a platform, and a marketplace. There are two major components to Filecoin markets, storage market and retrieval market. While both markets are expected to happen primarily off the blockchain, storage deals made in storage market will be published on chain and enforced by the protocol. Storage deal negotiation and order matching are expected to happen off chain in the first version of Filecoin. Retrieval deals are also negotiated off chain and executed with micropayments between transacting parties in payment channels.

Even though most of the market actions happen off the blockchain, there are on-chain invariants that create economic structure for network success and allow for positive emergent behavior. You can read more about the relationship between on chain deals and storage power in Storage Power Consensus.