This article takes you through the major events of Filecoin in 2020

On October 15, 2020, the much-anticipated Filecoin mainnet was launched after three years of development. At the beginning of 2021, Filecoin officials wrote this article to review every detail of 2020.

Filecoin Discover

Filecoin Discover was released during the Filecoin network testnet, aiming to incentivize Filecoin miners to store valuable data through Fil rewards. The Discover program is about helping subsidize Filecoin miners to select data from the Filecoin Discover Store, a valuable database covering literature, science, art, and history. Miners who want to participate in the Filecoin network can visit the website, select the datasets they want to store, and receive the data on their hard drive at only a small cost.

Filecoin Discover helps advance Filecoin’s mission to build a distributed, efficient, and powerful foundation for humanity’s information.

Release of Testnet Phase 2

At the end of 2019, we released the first phase of the Filecoin testnet. In May, we released the second phase. Testnet Phase 2 is the last major milestone before the mainnet launch. In the update, we released two interoperable Filecoin implementations (go-filecoin and lotus), security proofs (WinningPoSt and WindowPoSt), Drand, an overview of the network's cryptoeconomic model, a new documentation website, and the latest security audit before launch.

Announcing Filecoin Ignite

Back in June we were already moving full speed towards mainnet launch. We announced Filecoin Ignite, a series of events that will help (and go beyond) mainnet launch, bringing together creators, miners, researchers, enthusiasts, and other network participants. Ignite events include HackFS, Spark University Hackaton, Space Race 1 & 2, and the newly announced Filecoin Frontier Accelerator.

HackFS

In August, we successfully concluded the first HackFS hackathon. In one month, 134 teams participated in projects throughout the Filecoin ecosystem. In total, more than 470 hackers from 50 countries in 19 time zones participated in this 30-day online event.

Space Race 1

Space Race 1 was a 3-week competition to incentivize miners to add storage to the network and meet transaction quality targets. During the period, miners competed for rewards of up to 4 million FIL. By the end, 230PiB of storage had been added to the network - twice the original goal. 400 miners from 6 continents participated in the competition, and lessons were learned, 8 upgrades were made, and dozens of vulnerabilities were fixed to improve performance.

Filecoin Economic Report

In August we released the Filecoin Economic Report, a 34-page overview that explains how the Filecoin protocol aligns incentives and pragmatically rewards useful and reliable storage. The interaction of each mechanism must be considered during the design process, and other economic structures and products can emerge from these basic mechanism components. The document explains the specific incentive mechanisms and the economic incentives provided by the protocol itself. For every fee, reward, or penalty in the protocol, it explains how it contributes to the long-term future utility of the network.

Space Race 2: Slingshot

Space Race 1 was so successful and well received that we decided to hold another one. In September, we started Space Race 2 to continue bringing storage to the network.

Publishing Slate

Slate is a fully open source file sharing network designed for research and collaboration built by Protocol Labs for Filecoin. Slate allows users to store data, organize data, and share it with the world securely. The launch of Slate brought in more than 600 new accounts and ranked 5th on ProductHunt for the day. As of now, Slate has stored nearly 200GB of 23,486 unique user data for all users with zero downtime.

Filecoin Mainnet Release

At 3:00 PM (UTC) on October 15, 2020, the Filecoin network was officially launched. This moment marks the culmination of years of innovation and hard work. Thank you very much to everyone who has contributed their time, ideas, and expertise to make Filecoin a reality.

Mainnet Launch Week

We couldn’t let the Filecoin mainnet launch without a big celebration. From October 19th to 23rd, we hosted Filecoin Mainnet Launch Week, a week entirely dedicated to the Filecoin ecosystem, joined by speakers from around the world and across the Web3 ecosystem to speak to the community about their projects and the Filecoin network. Over 5 days, we had over 2,000 attendees with over 82,000 session views on YouTube. Filecoin Mainnet Launch Week featured 81 speakers representing all aspects of the Filecoin community in 84 sessions—application developers, miners, storage users, policymakers, civil rights activists, investors, and more.

Filecoin surpasses 1 EiB of storage

In November, the Filecoin community celebrated its first major milestone less than four weeks after the mainnet launch. As of November 24, the network’s distributed storage capacity has exceeded 1 Exabyte. What is 1 Exabyte? 1 Exabyte is enough to store 290 million 1080p movies, 4,500 Wikipedia profiles, 685,000 years of continuous video calls, and 19 backups of the entire Internet archive.

We wanted to wrap up the year with all the information the community has been asking about the Filecoin network and FIL economy. Together with ETH Global, we hosted a 1-day Storage Market Summit, which was full of exciting content. The day was divided into 5 themed "blocks", where developers, investors, and partners from the entire Filecoin ecosystem discussed and elaborated on different aspects of the Filecoin network and its economy.

2020 has taught us that the Filecoin community is capable of extraordinary innovation. The vast majority of the community’s achievements in 2020 were accomplished on the Filecoin testnet. We are now looking ahead to 2021 and beyond on the Filecoin mainnet, and we are incredibly excited.