Nelumbo Milestone Two

As part of the Nelumbo project, I set out to hit five specific milestones. You can actually see the original proposal, including milestones here. Today, I’m exciting to announce the completion of Milestone Two.

Before diving into what’s possible with Nelumbo so far, it’s important to understand what Nelumbo is and what problem it sets out to solve. Filecoin, a distributed storage network secured by a blockchain, launched its mainnet back in October of last year. Leading up to its launched, I participated in the Filecoin community and worked towards building Filecoin compatible storage applications. A storage application, simply put, is one that makes use of the Filecoin network without needing mining capabilities. The problem when building storage clients is that you must run a full Filecoin node in order to operate it. That means, you also have to run a node to develop.

Fortunately, Filecoin provides a local developer version of the Filecoin blockchain. Instead of trying to run a full node on your computer (which is likely impossible), you can run a local devnet and build with confidence that your code will work once deployed against the mainnet. However, Filecoin’s local devnet requires a deep understanding of command line operations, a bit of devops knowledge, and a ton of patience.

Nelumbo sets out to make the local devnet easier to use by wrapping it in a simple user interface. Rather than running the devnet through a bunch of commands in your terminal, you can launch a MacOS desktop application, click a button, and…