Slingshot is a two-part community competition for storage clients and developers that rewards the storage of real, valuable, and usable data on the Filecoin network. The goal is to load 10PiB of valuable data onto the Filecoin network. Teams are rewarded for storing more useful data and building interesting, novel, and powerful user interfaces (UIs) or applications associated with the data they store. The first phase of Slingshot lasted four weeks and culminated in a closing ceremony on October 28, 2020. Below, we will review the closing ceremony and the content of the first phase of Slingshot. Celebrating Slingshot Phase 1 To kick off the closing ceremony, Filecoin Product Lead Pooja Shah reviewed the four-week Slingshot Phase 1 competition. The Filecoin network has undergone tremendous changes, including the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, five community-led Filecoin Improvement Proposals, and up to 789PiB of storage capacity. To celebrate the network’s creation and achievements, the community organized “Filecoin Liftoff Week,” an event that brought together more than 80 experts to discuss Filecoin and related topics, including technical details, the development process, current and future applications, and everything in between. Celebrating Slingshot Phase 1 Against this exciting backdrop, Slingshot Phase 1 brought attention to useful data in the Filecoin network. More than 650 TiB of data was stored in more than 520,000 transactions. These transactions were completed by more than 100 projects in 19 countries and won 59,850 FIL in the overall prize pool. In addition to storing this useful data on the network, the Filecoin community has benefited in many other ways. Phase 1 stress-tested the Filecoin network in many ways, and Filecoin contributors and developers learned a lot about the workflow of the Filecoin storage client and found opportunities for improvement. The Filecoin developer and storage client community has also been growing steadily over the past few months. Across several channels on the Filecoin Slack, we’ve seen dozens of developers working together to share best practices and help each other store valuable datasets and build exciting applications on the Filecoin network. Community experts have also generously hosted sessions on a variety of topics, from masterclasses and office hours introducing key Filecoin concepts and tools to sharing how they’re building cool things on top of Filecoin in the “How We Built This” series. In just a few weeks of Slingshot Phase 1, the community has driven incredible network growth, and we can’t wait to see what Slingshot Phase 2 accomplishes! At the Slingshot closing ceremony, the nine teams that participated in Phase 1 presented their projects in a live demonstration. We saw a variety of projects that store data on Filecoin with interesting UIs, including: An interactive map where you can search the Google Open Images dataset and visualize where photos were taken (Deplatformr) A hub for Docker images (Dragonfly) File-sharing applications that store valuable public datasets, such as the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset and Creative Commons-licensed media (FileZoo, CreativeFileCloud, FileDrive) User interfaces share interesting and novel data, from meteorological data collected by universities to public VR videos (Starry Sky in Yunnan, ipfsNewBund) A game using Landsat8 satellite imagery data in an interactive game (Geoguesser) A platform to store AI training data and integrate it with a broader decentralized model training platform (Orion-DeepLearningCloud)
These teams have achieved a lot in a short period of time. After the live show, the first phase awards were presented to the winning teams. These awards were determined by Slingshot’s community review panel. The review process took three days, with the auditors evaluating the UI and retrieving the teams’ data from the Filecoin network to verify it. Finally, we awarded 59,850 FIL across three categories: Storage Award: Competitors who stored at least 500 TiB of data in the first phase received 50,000 FIL Community Award: A total of 5,550 FIL pools, awarded to the best projects in multiple categories Booster Awards: Any project that stores at least 1GiB of data can receive 50FIL rewards, a total of 4300FIL
Storage awards are distributed among all teams storing eligible data, in proportion to the amount they store. The top 5 teams in this part of the competition were: dragonfly CreativeFileCloud FileDrive Filecoin.Netdisk Matin-Cloud-pan
At the same time, the top projects in the storage race were announced. Greg Markou, co-founder and CTO of Chainsafe and community judge for the Slingshot competition, presented the Community Award. Personal user storage category: Other categories (250FIL prize each) Video: MoviesAX Music: WeRaveYou Scientific Datasets: Deplatformr Machine Learning: Yolo Technical Complexity: Decentralized Docker Hub Outstanding Creativity: ipfsNewBund User interface: geoguesser
Community Convener Award (each person will receive a 100FIL honorary award) Smart City IPFS Found Free Music Archive Browser Anwen Web3 Content Community diceSolo Chains' DB VOF (Video Cryptocurrency) Cadbury Meet
Congratulations to all of these teams and well done on your projects! Entering the second stage Pooja looks at what to expect from Slingshot Phase 2. Slingshot Phase 2 officially begins on October 21, 2020 at 18:00 UTC. We will announce the final rules and rewards on November 9, 2020, and open official registration for this phase of the competition on November 11, 2020. For teams looking to start participating in Phase 2 before then, Pooja offers guidance: Unlike Phase 1 where application data storage was eligible for rewards, Phase 2 can only store curated datasets. These datasets must be added to the list of canonical curated datasets in the Slingshot competition Github repository; data must come from a reputable source, be useful for the public interest, and be publicly accessible to be accepted on this list. The dataset must be accessible and explorable by anyone in the world, which means you must provide public documentation about what data is stored and how to retrieve it from the Filecoin network. Participants cannot store any data using their own miners, and any single miner can only store a maximum of 30% of the participants’ total data. As in Phase 1, contestants are expected to maintain an index of the data stored throughout the competition, and will be asked to submit a list of transactions at the end of the competition (including transaction ID, miner ID, payload CID, file name, file format, file size, and date of all data stored). Participants should expect even more rewards and events in Phase 2! This includes storage awards, community choice awards, supplementary awards, community events, and office hours. Finally, Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet closed the book on Phase 1 by offering some thoughts on Slingshot and how he hopes the competition will progress. The Filecoin project is still in its early stages, and there are many opportunities to create valuable use cases, integrations, and more to influence the direction of the project. You can listen to his talk here.
Congratulations to all the teams that participated in Phase 1. If you are interested in Phase 2, stay tuned for details to be announced here on November 9th. We are in awe of what the community has been able to accomplish so far, and are excited to see what’s to come! Onward! |
