Pindependent

In 2022-2023, DeFi has been plagued with:

• Regulation from corrupt bureaucrats
• Predatory DeFi front ends
• Centralized hosting failures
• A lack of incentives for effective community alignment
• Difficulty in creating defensible economic moats

The chilling effect of various government agencies' regulation by enforcement has prevented developers from monetizing their protocols, and prevented many from even building and launching in the first place.

Pindependent is an inheritable smart contract which pays users of EVM chains for hosting any file on the FVM that is specified by the smart contract on the origin chain.

It solves for users' and developers' constraints. Users want to participate in a protocol's upside; developers still want organic marketing, which is frequently generated through token sales. Distributing part or all of the fees paid to a protocol to those hosting the front end on Filecoin's FVM involves a protocol's community to a similar degree.

Furthermore, several regulatory agencies are attempting to hold operators of DeFi protocols' front ends liable for their users. Pindependent contracts ensure these files are always available, and not limited to a single provider - i.e. decentralized.

As if aggressive overcompliance weren't bad enough, some front end operators are even charging a percentage of transaction volume through their front end. Decentralizing the provisioning of such front ends prevents protocols' credible neutrality from being destroyed, and disincentivizes this type of monetization by providing an alternative outlet for fees charged in the protocol itself.

Finally, centralized front ends have been targeted with DNS attacks, for example the Fantom/Polygon RPC attacks in July 2022. Since files are immutable, and verifiable with a determinstic file hash (content identifier, CID), these types of attacks are impossible with Pindependent contracts.

We used Filecoin's FVM to make deals for storage, specifically using some of Lighthouse's contracts for submitting files and tracking deal status using their getActiveDeals function.

Pincentive contracts make calls from an Axelar-supported origin chain, such as Scroll, Mantle, or Polygon zkEVM. This call requests the list of active hosts for a specified file (likely the applications front end, but not limited to this use case). The list is returned, and those addresses paid a percentage of tokens from the pool of fees.