<aside> 📢 The below Saturn docs are out of date. Please head to https://docs.saturn.tech to read the latest Saturn docs.

</aside>

In 2022, Protocol Labs started an initiative called Filecoin Saturn. The initial (v0) aim of Saturn is to:

  1. Serve files stored on Filecoin to clients at web speed.
  2. Empower more people to join and contribute to Filecoin’s network, and earn FIL in reward, with reduced hardware requirements compared to Filecoin storage providers.

Saturn is a decentralized CDN for IPLD, accelerating retrievals of media files from the Filecoin Network.

What is Saturn?

In its initial form, there are two “rings” of Saturn. The L1 cache nodes and the L2 cache nodes. The L1 cache nodes are the entry points to the Saturn Network from browsers. L1s will predominantly run in data centres with high availability and bandwidth.

The L2 cache nodes will run on Filecoin Station - an Electron app for the Filecoin Network. Station operators can download the Station app and run it on their desktops, just like any other desktop app. They can then set up a Filecoin wallet in the app and start earning FIL for providing lightning-fast media retrievals to the Saturn network.

By leveraging the unique properties of content-addressing, IPLD, p2p networks and decentralization, we hope Saturn will be able to compete with - or even outperform - traditional CDNs in certain dimensions, whilst rewarding anyone who would like to contribute to the network.

This groundbreaking interplanetary endeavor is looking for highly-skilled full-stack engineers and distributed system engineers to join.

Why Now?

The media for many millions of web3 assets is stored on IPFS and Filecoin, thanks to the amazing efforts of *.storage. We would like to offer an even better retrieval service to the nascent and fast-growing web3 media market.

Station v0

v0 Goals

For v0, we should achieve the following goals.

  1. To deploy the Saturn network, complete with analytics and monitoring.
  2. To enable an e2e retrieval from a browser to any content-addressed file held in Saturn.
  3. To achieve, for any chosen file, an average retrieval TTFB of less than 1 seconds from the top 100 ASNs (measured by logged requests to the IPFS Gateway).
  4. To launch Station, a desktop application that anyone can download and run with zero config that starts a retrieval provider node, and walks through the flow of setting up a wallet and earning FIL.