Filecoin: A look back at 2020

Filecoin Discover

Filecoin Discover was launched during Filecoin’s testnet days as an incentive for Filecoin miners to store valuable data and earn extra FIL in the process. The Discover program is based on compensating Filecoin miners for selecting data from the Filecoin Discover Store, a library of valuable data covering literature, science, art, and history. Miners who wish to join the Filecoin network can visit the site, select the datasets they want to store, and receive them on their drives at cost. Many of the lessons learned from the R&D and community engagement phases of Filecoin Discover helped shape the Filecoin Plus program.

Filecoin Discover continues to advance Filecoin’s mission to create a decentralized, efficient, and powerful foundation for humanity’s information.

Testnet Phase 2 Launched

Towards the end of 2019, we launched the first phase of the Filecoin testnet. In May, we launched phase 2. Testnet 2 is the last major milestone before the mainnet launch. In this update, we released two interoperable Filecoin implementations (WinningPoSt and WindowPoSt), Drand’s overview of the network’s cryptoeconomic structure, a new documentation site before launch, and a new security audit.

June 2020: Getting ready for mainnet launch

Filecoin Ignite Announcement

By June, we were already moving full speed toward mainnet launch. We announced Filecoin Ignite, a schedule of multiple events that would bring together miners, researchers, enthusiasts, and other network participants before launch (and beyond). Ignite events included HackFS, the Spark University Hackathon, Space Race 1 and 2, and the newly announced Filecoin Frontier Accelerator.

August 2020: Activating the Community

HackFS

August marked the completion of our inaugural HackFS hackathon. Over the course of a month, 134 teams worked on projects across the Filecoin ecosystem. In total, over 470 hackers from 50 countries across 19 time zones participated in the 30-day virtual event. Check out the full bios of the top 10 finalist teams: Sailplane, Public Annotation Network (PAN) Protocol, Pnlp, BlockSig, Valist, IPFS Recovery, PlanetFlare, Web3API, Decentralized Docker Hub, and Pygate.

Space Race 1

Space Race 1 was a three-week competition designed to incentivize miners to add storage to the network and hit transaction quality targets. During the competition, miners competed for a prize of 4M FIL. At the end of the competition, 230PiB of storage was added to the network - more than 2x the original goal. 400 miners from six continents participated, and lessons learned were used to conduct eight network upgrades, including dozens of bug and performance fixes. The community also hosted a series of technical talks, workshops, and deep dives, which can be found on the Filecoin Youtube channel.

Filecoin Economic Report

In August, we released the Filecoin Economic Report, a 34-page overview of how the Filecoin protocol aligns incentives and pragmatically rewards useful and reliable storage. The Filecoin network’s economic design seeks to align incentives and pragmatically reward useful and reliable storage with as few rules as possible. The protocol’s many mechanisms and incentives are carefully designed with a single goal in mind: if participants in the network’s economy pursue their own self-interest, the network should grow and prosper.

September 2020: Mainnet Ignition

Space Race 2

Space Race 1 was so successful, we knew we had to do it again. In September, we launched Space Race 2 to continue onboarding storage to the network, and introduced a new Slingshot track for Filecoin clients, application developers, and tool developers to deploy their products to the testnet. As a result, application developers stored over 650 TiB of data across 520,000 transactions. These transactions were made by over 100 projects in 19 countries. For their efforts, these contestants received 59,850 FIL in the total prize pool for the first phase of the Slingshot competition.

Slingshot launch

Slate is a fully open source file sharing network built by Protocol Labs for Filecoin for research and collaboration. Slate allows users to store data, organize data, and securely share it with the world. The launch of Slate brought in over 600 new accounts and became the fifth-ranked product of the day on ProductHunt. To date, Slate has stored nearly 200GB of data for 23,486 unique users, storing data for all users with 0 downtime.

October 2020: All systems are online

Filecoin mainnet launched!

The date we’ve all been waiting for… On October 15, 2020 at 3 PM UTC, the Filecoin network went live. This moment marks the culmination of years of innovation and hard work by the Filecoin community. A huge thank you to everyone who has donated their time, ideas, and expertise to make Filecoin a reality.

Liftoff Week!

We couldn’t launch the Filecoin mainnet without a proper celebration. From October 19-23, the community hosted Filecoin Liftoff, a week-long event entirely dedicated to the Filecoin ecosystem. Speakers from around the world and across the Web3 ecosystem joined us to discuss their projects and the Filecoin network. Over 2,000 participants led over 82,000 sessions on YouTube over the past 5 days. Filecoin Liftoff was led by 84 delegates with 81 speakers representing all players in the Filecoin community – application developers, miners, storage clients, policymakers, investors, and more!

November 2020: First Milestone Metropolis

Storage over 1EB

The first milestone has been reached! Filecoin exceeds 1 Exbibyte of storage.

Less than four weeks after the mainnet launch, the Filecoin community celebrated its first major milestone in November. As of November 24, the network’s decentralized storage capacity exceeded 1 exbibyte (EiB). How much is an exbibyte? 1 EiB is enough to store: 290 million 1080p movies, 4,500 Wikipedias, 685,000 years of continuous video calls, or 19 copies of the entire Internet Archive.

December 2020: Filecoin Ecosystem Economics

The Filecoin community hosted a 1-day Packaged Storage Market Summit in conjunction with ETH Global. The day was divided into five themed “blocks” where developers, investors, and partners from the Filecoin ecosystem provided deep dives and overviews of different aspects of the Filecoin network and its economy. A summary of each block can be found on the blog, and recordings can be found on the Filecoin Youtube channel.

Looking Ahead: Filecoin in 2021

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the Filecoin community has an extraordinary capacity for innovation. The vast majority of what the community accomplished in 2020 was accomplished through the Filecoin testnet. Now, as we look ahead to 2021 and beyond on the Filecoin mainnet, we can’t wait to see what we can build together in 2021.