At 6 am on August 25th, Beijing time, the Filecoin Testnet Incentive Program (Space Race) was officially launched!
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1. The Space Race
💸 Space Race. This morning, the Filecoin Testnet Incentive Program (Space Race) was officially launched, a 3-week cooperative competition designed to stress test the network, encourage global miners to participate, and provide an opportunity to test-run Filecoin before the mainnet launch . This is a huge milestone! Marks our last major update before mainnet launch to bring the Filecoin protocol and Lotus implementation to a "mainnet ready state".
🎛 Calibration Devnet. A month-long calibration period successfully completes the actual storage and retrieval transactions and executes the entire sector lifecycle, helping miners prepare for the space race. During this period, miners achieved a 97% success rate for retrieval transactions, and 24 of the top 50 miners achieved a 100% success rate for storage transactions.
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2. Main network function
💪 Enhanced mainnet functions. The main focus of our work is to enhance the lifecycle of storing and retrieving transactions in the Filecoin blockchain, including upgrading the commitment space with real transactions, storing multiple transactions in a sector, requesting miners to retrieve them quickly through unsealed copies, and Swap Filecoin for successful transactions via payment channels (greatly improved). We also introduced "true" gas fee VM implementations ⛽ , including one of the first implementations of EIP1559. See the Lotus 0.5.0 release for more details.
Drand mainnet. The Filecoin network uses Drand (a production-grade distributed randomness beacon network) as an external source of randomness for consensus. Since the launch of the drand mainnet, the randomness network now includes all participants of the Entropy Alliance, such as Cloudflare, Ethereum, Chainsafe, EPFS, UCL, Truffle, etc.
🔐 The second stage of trusted settings. We completed the second phase of the "Trust Setting Ceremony", where participants from around the world contributed their resources to help generate the security parameters of the Filecoin network and public proofs that can be verified by anyone. We have 15-25 unique participants per circuit (6 circuits in total), including organizations like Ethereum Foundation, Consensys, Supranational, Ocean Protocol, IPFSMain, Sigma Prime, etc. More coming soon - including instructions for any third-party verification of trusted setup output.
🔋Mainnnet final proof. Based on the output of the "Phase 2 Trusted Setup", we released the final SDR proof-of-replication parameters for mainnet launch. These evidences have been reviewed for correctness, completeness and reliability. You can find them at https://proofs.filecoin.io. Note: Miners should expect Filecoin to regularly upgrade its proofs after launch.
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3. Ecosystem Highlights
👨👩👧👦Filecoin Ecosystem. There are currently more than 70 meaningful organizations building on the Filecoin testnet and collaborating with each other. Here are some recent updates:
Powergate by Textile: Powergate is an API-driven solution for deploying IPFS and Filecoin-based multi-tier storage into systems and applications. Developers can persist data on Filecoin, ensure availability on IPFS, manage one or more Filecoin addresses with access controls, monitor long-term storage transactions, use multiple supported clients and libraries, and more!
Truffle: Truffle announced a partnership with Filecoin and released the truffle preserve command, which enables developers to preserve application data within the Truffle CLI. Next up is Filecoin-style Ganache, which developers can use to launch a Filecoin emulator. With one command, users will get both a Filecoin (simulated Lotus) node and an IPFS server, automatically configured and ready to use. Users can use this emulator instead of actual Lotus nodes or Powergate's localnet to speed up development and unit testing. More updates are coming!
Space: The Fleek team announced their latest product, Space, an open source file storage, sharing and collaboration platform built on a distributed network. You can think of Space V1 as a private, encrypted, p2p version of Dropbox or Google Drive, and use Space just like those products. The biggest advantage of using Space compared to other products is that you don't need to sacrifice your privacy and allow those companies to monitor you and control your files and data, because with Space, everything is private, end-to-end and peer-to-peer encryption!
Retrieval Marketplace: Chainsafe recently demonstrated an initial implementation of the Retrieval Marketplace on HackFS. Their retrieval tool incorporates Lotus nodes into a peer-to-peer network based on libp2p gossipsub. The network allows clients to request files from a peer-to-peer network or Lotus nodes and their Storage Miner peers.
Custody support: Token custodians Gemini, Coinbase, and Anchorage all announced support for custody of Filecoin tokens at mainnet launch. Anchorage will also support Filecoin's unlocking contracts at launch. If you plan to hold Filecoin, check out these custodians to learn more.
🔥 Filecoin Ignite. Filecoin Ignite continues to offer a series of hackathons and learning events for the community to help support the rapidly growing Filecoin ecosystem. HackFS was our first campaign and it was a huge success.
HackFS: HackFS is a 30-day virtual hackathon in partnership with the ETHGlobal team, helping over 130 projects join the decentralized web. A total of more than 470 hackers from 50 countries in 19 time zones participated in the event. Dive into the stories behind the 10 teams that took part in the hackathon, relive the HackFS Finale to find out which teams took home the grand prize, or learn more about all 134 final projects in the HackFS Showcase.
The Spark University Hackathon is a 6-week virtual hackathon hosted by Encode Club, an online community of university students, academics, and developers built in the blockchain. 50 teams from universities around the world responded to two Filecoin challenges, and the winners will be announced during the live finals next Monday, August 31st.
Apollo: APOLLO is a 6-week program run by Gitcoin to provide community service to builders in the Filecoin ecosystem. Think of it as mission control for the top InterPlanetary Filecoin developers across space and time! More than 150 outstanding builders will have the opportunity to become the pioneers of the Filecoin and Web3 ecosystem. Applications will close on Friday, August 28.
Filecoin Launchpad: The Filecoin Launchpad Accelerator is a full-time, fully remote program dedicated to startups building for the distributed and decentralized web. Between 15 and 20 teams will enter the program and will go through twelve weeks of funding, mentoring and programming around business and blockchain-specific issues, culminating in Demo Day. The team leverages access to the ConsenSys and Protocol Labs networks and expertise, ranging from entrepreneurs and legal advisors to breakthrough technology researchers. Each team will receive an investment of $80,000. The application deadline has now been extended to August 28th!
Reach out and let us know if you'd like to host an Ignite event! With over 4 million FIL and $250,000 in prize money spread across events, now is an excellent time to start building projects on Filecoin. 🚀
🎲 Random Summit. To celebrate the release of the Entropy Alliance's production-grade drand beacon, the Random Summit was held on August 13th. Speakers included Bryan Ford, Joseph Boneau, Justin Drake, Kelly Olson, and Vitalik Buterin, as well as representatives from LoE partners Cloudflare, Kudelski Security, Protocol Labs, and the University of Chile, with presentations ranging from the foundations of randomness to the future of VDFs. A full transcript of the summit is available on Protocol Labs' YouTube channel.
🛳️ The fourth wave of Filecoin DevGrants. We have received an overwhelming response from community members to the RFP Round 4, which has contained 28 proposals so far. New proposals are still being accepted on a rolling basis as we prepare to go live on mainnet. The full list of funded projects will be released soon, so far Winning Wave 4 proposals include Snarks as a service for miners, integration with Ceramic Protocol and OrbitDB, improvements to the Bellman library used by Filecoin Proofs, ENS for Filecoin addresses Support and the ability to search and archive national legislative documents on Filecoin, with more proposals currently under review. Wave 5 proposals for the Filecoin DevGrants program are due on October 1st, and a new Wave 5 RFP will be released soon.
📞 Community events. The community will continue to meet regularly to share progress and new ideas. Over the past two months, the community of dapp developers, miners, and ecosystem clients has had many meetups:
Storage Devs Show & Tell: In part three of the Filecoin Storage Dev Show & Tell, we feature demos from across the ecosystem. The team at BlockRocket showed us the NFT Snapshot Bot, MetaMask previewed the Filecoin Snap, we learned about Filecoin being added to the Ocean Protocol public market, and checked out the Space Race dashboard and bot. Leandro Barbosa walks us through a Voodfy video transcoding demo on IPFS and Filecoin, followed by a Filecoin wallet demo from OpenBazaar, a recording of the Dev Show & Tell is available on the Filecoin Youtube channel.
Filecoin Virtual Community Meetup: The Filecoin Community Meetup is an opportunity to get together the Filecoin community and showcase the many tools and projects being built in our ecosystem. At this month's meetup, Figment Networks talked about Hubble, a validator and Datahub's reputation system that helps developers build faster on blockchains. Then, the team from Fleek previewed Space Storage, a new file storage, sharing and collaboration platform with a focus on privacy. We then heard from Gitcoin who gave us an overview of the APOLLO plan and mission control for your interactions with builders and actors within the Filecoin community. The party ended with Mosh's overview of the space race. You can catch all the demos by signing up for the next meetup on September 15th on the Filecoin Youtube channel.
Mining Community Video Conference: During last month's Mining Community Video Conference, we heard from the Filecoin team. Colin shared an ecosystem update and outlined all the progress made since the last mining community call in May. Ian and Molly discussed how to prepare for Space Race, the incentivized testnet competition that kicked off this week, and we finished with a Q&A session moderated by Aayush.
Filecoin Masterclass: On August 17th, we kicked off the masterclass series by demonstrating how to use the Slate API with Filecoin and IPFS. The second session of the masterclass series will be on Tuesday, September 1 at 9AM PST on how to build decentralized applications using Fleek's Space Daemon, including live demonstrations. Sign up here.
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4. Mainnet launch
The next most important milestone is the launch of the Filecoin mainnet in mid-to-late September.
We will update the public project roadmap Gantt chart with the latest estimates. The past month has seen amazing progress in the Filecoin ecosystem, with miners recalibrating their equipment every week, hundreds of amazing projects being developed in the Filecoin Ignite competition, and plenty of events and improved tooling to celebrate.
So many teams have been part of this new phase for the Filecoin network. Thank you so much:
Over the past year and a half, many mining communities have helped test and improve Filecoin in the devnet.
Ecosystem developers like Textile, Open Work Labs, Fleek, Truffle, Figment, Zondax, Digital Mob, and many more teams who create new tools and infrastructure make the Filecoin network stronger.
The Filecoin implementation team, Chainsafe, Soramitsu, and Fengduo have been working hard to make Forest and Fuhon fully interoperable with Lotus.
A network of customers and partners using Filecoin to create awesome applications for decentralized storage, like Starling, Space, Slate, and all the awesome projects at HackFS.
Community organizers such as EthGlobal, Gitcoin, Tachyon, Encode Club, etc. have brought this community together and helped many new contributors.
And of course the wider community, who help improve Filecoin in a variety of ways (from documentation, newsletters, community support).
You are all what make this network great, and we are honored to work with you. 🛠️
