Direct data onboarding is a label for changes to the Filecoin built-in actors, and the components that interact with them, to enable gas-cheap data onboarding, including Filecoin Plus. The built-in storage market actor is bypassed, and the verified registry’s on-chain allocation/claim record suffices to represent a simple “deal”. Direct data onboarding can’t handle client payments (yet), but most deals today have no on-chain payment anyway.
After the initial Direct data onboarding changes, subsequent, smaller changes will be possible to support scalable FIL+ allocations (single transaction covering multiple sectors) and flexibility for other kinds of data applications.
See also:
Judging by analysis of some batched deal and onboarding messages from mainnet, the potential gas savings for Direct FIL+ onboarding, as compared with a built-in market verified deal, are:
If participants do choose to use a built-in market deal (e.g. for a client payment) but take advantage of the new APIs, deals will not need to be specified or checked at pre-commit. The PreCommitSectorBatch gas reduction will benefit these parties too.
Note that the reduction in total gas costs is accompanied by a change in the parties paying them. Instead of the SP paying for PublishStorageDeals, the client pays for creating a datacap allocation (~15% of the PSD cost). Additional mechanisms could be added so that the SP pays this cost, if needed.
The first-order impacts of this are reduced SP onboarding costs and reduced variability in those costs, improving total returns. Reduced gas use for onboarding reduces competition for chain bandwidth, likely leading to a reduction in base fee and transaction costs for other parties.
Second-order effects of reduced gas usage and base fee include reduced base fee burn rate (which accounts for ~12.5% of net circulating supply outflows) in the near term. Reduced onboarding costs may induce more onboarding (locking pledge accounts for the other 87.5% of supply outflows) and user demand for other transactions, more likely over a longer term.
A verified client going direct can immediately specify a 5-year maximum term. The storage provider can only up-front commit a sector for 1.5 years (3.5 years after FIP-0052), but if the client has allowed it, they will be able to extend the sector out to the 5-year maximum while retaining full QAP with no further client interaction.