Slingshot Phase 2 Participant Guide

Slingshot is a community competition for storage clients and developers that rewards real, valuable, and usable data stored on the Filecoin network. The first phase of the Slingshot competition took place over four weeks. The Filecoin storage client and developer community passed several important milestones, including:

More than 730 TiB of data were stored in more than 450,000 storage transactions to unlock the 50,000 FIL prize pool.

15 sessions with speakers sharing lessons and insights into developer tools and how to navigate Filecoin as a storage client.

You can read all about Slingshot Phase 1 in our summary blog post.

In this blog post, we will introduce Slingshot Phase 2. If you are interested in earning FIL rewards for storing valuable data on the Filecoin network, Slingshot is for you!

Slingshot Phase 2 is a community competition that rewards teams for storing valuable data on the Filecoin network. In Phase 2, we are looking for teams that can preserve public, open-access datasets on the Filecoin network.

The goals of the slingshot are as follows:

1. Preserve humanity’s most important datasets on the Filecoin network. Filecoin’s mission has always been to provide humanity with the information foundation it needs. With Slingshot, we are very excited to be working with a team energized by the same mission so that we can realize this vision together! This includes telemetry and imaging datasets, historical archives, media and entertainment datasets licensed under Creative Commons, scientific research papers, and more! We currently plan to continue the competition until we have stored 10PiB of valuable data on the network.

2. Make these important datasets accessible and exploreable to anyone in the world. Storing important datasets to the Filecoin network is a critical step, but we also want people around the world to be able to access this data, explore it, and potentially use it for their own projects! All participants must store their data in a way that can be reused by others, and must provide public-facing documentation that shows exactly how the stored data is used. We provide more specific documentation steps in the rules below.

3. Enhance the experience of Filecoin storage clients and developers . When participating in the competition, you will find ways to improve the overall experience of Filecoin storage clients and developers. Your feedback is very valuable, and we are happy to work with you to improve the experience of using Filecoin products!

4. Have fun and build our community of developers and customers! In the coming months, we will be providing lots of opportunities for community members to connect, showcase their projects, and share insights with each other. If you have an idea for a meetup or event, please let us know by filing an issue in the Slingshot repository!

In this competition, rewards are awarded for depositing curated datasets (i.e., public datasets that have been approved for deposit in this competition) in a well-documented, thoughtful, and reusable manner.

Slingshot Phase 2 is very different from competing in Slingshot Phase 1. If you are participating in Phase 2, please read this section carefully!

To participate in Slingshot Phase 2, you must store one of the curated datasets listed in the Slingshot GitHub repository. Once you’ve chosen your dataset and determined a plan for storing your data, you can register to participate in the competition on the Slingshot website https://slingshot.filecoin.io. Then, continue to store valuable data to earn more rewards.

To receive a prize in this contest, you must follow the contest rules:

1. Your project must store an approved curated dataset to Filecoin. If you want to store a dataset that is not on this list, please submit a PR to the filecoin-project/slingshot GitHub repo. Encrypted data will not be counted towards the reward.

2. Any one miner can only store up to 30% of the total data. This means that your project must store data with more than 4 miners, and your data cannot be overly concentrated in any single miner.

3. You cannot store any data using your own miners. Data stored by your own miners will not be counted towards the final reward. This may also be grounds for disqualification. You can store up to 10 copies of the same data on the network. If you store more than 10 copies of the same data, we will not count the additional copies in the final reward. If you store more than 10 copies of the same data, we may disqualify your team.

4. Every piece of data you store into the Filecoin network must be retrievable by others. This means you must carefully consider how to store your dataset so that others can retrieve it. We will score the reusability and retrievability of data from Filecoin and adjust rewards for teams that do not have retrievable data.

5. In order to receive rewards, you need to submit and publish data processing and retrieval documents through your account on the Slingshot website. During the final review process, we will also judge the quality of your documents. The documentation must include:

A. Which curated dataset you want to store and a link to that dataset.

B. The exact steps on how to process the dataset and store it to Filecoin.

C. Links to any tools used for preprocessing.

D. The exact steps for another person to retrieve, view, and use any stored data.

6. To be eligible for rewards, you must submit a list of successful transactions conducted on the Filecoin network.

You can submit this list as a CSV upload to your account on the Slingshot website. Please submit this table as a text-based CSV including the 8 columns listed below (for example in Google, use the same names and order as here, CSV example here). Incomplete or incorrect lists may result in disqualification, so make sure to start preparing these lists as soon as possible. These lists can also be used by other participants in the Slingshot Phase 2 competition to build hacks on top of them, so the trade lists must be usable by others.

A.deal_id: This is an integer that uniquely identifies a transaction on the Filecoin network. You may not have multiple rows with the same transaction ID in your list submission. The transaction ID must be on-chain (via lotus state get-deal ) can be found.

B.miner_id: f0XXXX stores the ID of the miner in this particular transaction.

C.payload_cid: The CID of the root of the DAG, representing the file or directory included in this transaction. lotus client deal If you use Lotus, this is the CID you provide.

D.filename: The human-readable filename of the resulting content (with any appropriate file extension).

E.file_format: The data format (mime type or extension) of how the file receiver should interpret the data.

F.deal_size_in_bytes: The size of the transaction in bytes.

G.date: Timestamp of the transaction in the following format (YYYY-MM-dd HH:mm).

H.curated_dataset: The name of the curated dataset (from this list) you want to store.

7. If you have any questions during the competition, please check:

Slingshot website: https://slingshot.filecoin.io

This website is the source of truth for the entire Filecoin competition. It includes the latest rules, competition leaderboards, events, and more!

Slingshot library: https://github.com/filecoin-project/slingshot.

This repository contains important resources for the competition, such as datasets that you can choose to store for the competition. You can create a new Slingshot discussion board to ask any questions about the program.

Slack: If you haven’t already, join the Filecoin Project Slack workspace and the following channels:

#slingshot-announcements – Major announcements about the Slingshot program

#slingshot – for debugging help and community conversation

We are excited to announce that Slingshot Phase 2 will distribute at least 500,000 FIL in rewards! This is in addition to the 50,000 FIL that will be distributed for Slingshot Phase 1.

The Slingshot Rewards Pool is collaborative and competitive. The more data a Slingshot participant stores into the network, the more you’ll earn in the rewards pool!

Storage rewards are distributed monthly, with the storage tier unlocked. Our plan is to continue this competition over the next few months. We thought it would be better if we could offer rewards monthly, without having to wait until the competition ends! As a result, we have a monthly reward window that will be used to determine the final reward distribution for that month. All deadlines below are 1800 UTC.

Storage rewards will be distributed proportionally based on the amount of new valid data that Slingshot participants have stored during the reward window. The amount of valid data may differ from the total data stored after accounting for excessive redundant copies, unretrievable data, datasets that don't match the curated dataset list, bad documentation (if you have a large amount of unretrievable data), and more. Some teams may be disqualified from the competition for not following the rules, so make sure to follow the rules!

Additionally, we will be offering a booster award in Slingshot Phase 2! If you follow the rules and store more than 50GiB of new data during the reward window, you will receive a 10FIL Booster award.

Over time, other prizes may become available!

Note: All rewards earned will be distributed linearly over six months from mainnet launch. Additionally, while we do not expect this, rewards may be restructured, delayed, or canceled in the event that Protocol Labs or the Filecoin Foundation determines, at their sole discretion, that legal or regulatory issues prevent the delivery of any portion of the rewards.

We’re excited to continue Slingshot with familiar Phase 1 participants and new faces alike! Your efforts will contribute greatly to continuing to grow the amount of real-world data stored on humanity’s largest decentralized storage network. Thank you Filecoin storage clients, developers, and the community. On to Slingshot Phase 2!

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