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Today's News Recap

Payment Partners - Mastercard partners with Circle and Paxos to enable stablecoin payments for merchants.

ETFs and Elections - South Korea's ruling party plans to approve Bitcoin spot ETFs, scrap banking rules ahead of June 3 election. 

Legal Reckoning - Legal actions target Celsius founder with potential 20-year sentences, and Tornado Cash sanctions are challenged.

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Two Bits

Expanding Beyond Storage for the AI Economy

By: Armita 

The accelerating demands of artificial intelligence are straining existing storage, retrieval, and compute infrastructure, and exposing the limits of centralized cloud models. As AI systems grow larger and more complex, the need for decentralized, verifiable alternatives is becoming increasingly clear.

Filecoin, originally positioned as decentralized storage for Web3, is steadily evolving into a broader infrastructure layer built to support AI-native applications. 

Several developments highlight this shift:

  • Retrieval Markets are being developed to enable faster, decentralized access to stored data, critical for AI inference workflows.

  • Compute-over-Data (CoD) initiatives allow decentralized compute to operate directly on stored datasets, addressing major bottlenecks in training and deployment.

  • The Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), launched in 2023, enabled smart contract programmability directly linked to storage operations, laying the foundation for composable storage, retrieval, and compute applications. By Q1 2025, around 5,000 unique contracts had been deployed.

  • Network v25 ("Teep"), deployed in March 2025, expanded transient storage support on the Filecoin EVM (FEVM), enhancing compatibility with Ethereum-based AI and compute applications.

  • Fast Finality (F3), targeted for mid-2025, aims to reduce transaction finality from hours to minutes, improving throughput for real-time decentralized applications.

New services reinforce this transition:

  • Lighthouse is building retrieval networks optimized for AI data pipelines.

  • Bacalhau enables decentralized compute over Filecoin datasets.

  • Filecoin Web Services (FWS), launched in March 2025, offers decentralized equivalents to AWS S3, Lambda, and ECS — aimed at integrating storage and compute under a unified framework for developers.

  • Filecoin is also gaining adoption among decentralized AI infrastructure projects, including Aethir, KiteAI, Nuklai, and SingularityNET, which use its verifiable storage to support AI agents, decentralized knowledge graphs, and metadata management.

This shift is already visible across a growing ecosystem of teams building with Filecoin:

Source: Filecoin. Over 60 startups are building across Filecoin’s storage, compute, AI, and DePIN ecosystem (as of March 2025).

By bringing together verifiable storage, decentralized data access, and programmable compute, Filecoin is quietly laying the groundwork for a more open, AI-powered internet; one that doesn’t depend on a handful of centralized cloud providers.

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