Filecoin successfully upgraded its network, briefly discussing the impact of FIP-14 and the April 15th halving and QA

When the block height of the Filecoin network reached 665280, that is, at 22:00 UTC on April 12, 06:00 Beijing time on April 13, the Filecoin network was forcibly upgraded to Lotus V1.6.0. Next, let’s take a look at the content and impact of this network upgrade.

What is included in this version update?

This version upgrade mainly includes the following four contents:

• The way miners expand v1 sectors (FIP-14 proposal)

• Upgrade the butterfly network

• Introducing the v11 network upgrade

• Debug mode: make upgrades highly controllable via envvars

Among them, the specific operations of expanding the v1 sector to 540 days were discussed this time.

The lotus-miner sectors extend CLI has been extended with a new option that automatically extends all extendable v1 sectors, which can be run with lotus-miner sectors extend --v1-sectors:

• tolerance can convey this flag to indicate which durations are not worth "extending", default is one week.

• expiration-cutoff This flag can be passed to skip sectors whose expiration time is beyond a certain point from the current head. It defaults to infinity (no cutoff), but, for example, if 28800 is specified, only sectors expiring 10 days in the future will be extended (1 day is 2880 epochs).

What are the impacts of implementing FIP-14?

First of all, the main content of the FIP-14 proposal is that the Filecoin V1 sector life cycle can be extended to 540 days.

Filecoin V1 sectors refer to sectors encapsulated before the Lotus V1.2.0 version upgrade was completed. Lotus V1.2.0 was upgraded on November 24, 2020. Therefore, we will call the sectors before November 24, 2020 Filecoin V1 sectors.

According to statistics, there are approximately 26.2 million Filecoin V1 sectors. Since miners can modify the life cycle of sectors by changing the code, during the life cycle stage of the V1 sector, some miners choose the life cycle of the sector to be 180 or 360 days.

If the life cycle of the V1 sector cannot be renewed or extended, many sectors will disappear one after another, and the network will lose computing power.

• March 26, 2021: The first sector expires.

• April 14, 2021: Daily sector expiration rate exceeds 10,000 per day, or 312 TiB per day.

• April 22, 2021: The daily sector expiration rate exceeds 100K per day, or 3.05PiB per day.

• May 10, 2021: Peak sector expiration rate, approximately 210,000 per day, or 6.13PiB per day.

• May 28, 2021: The daily sector expiration rate is less than 10,000 per day, or 312 TiB per day.

The implementation of the FIP-14 proposal allows the life cycle of all sectors to be extended to 540 days, which can effectively alleviate the disappearance of sectors, maintain the smooth operation of the network and contribute to the development of the Filecoin network ecosystem.

What are the misunderstandings about FIP-14?

Recently, there have been several misunderstandings about FIP-14. Some people even confused FIP-14 with the production cut on April 15 and the suspension of deposits and withdrawals on the trading platform last night, and believed that FIL production will be released sharply in the future and that the current situation of Filecoin is worrying. Next, we will review the key points again through QA.