Filecoin officially announces countdown to mainnet launch

1. Announcement of Mainnet Ignition and Launch

Over the past few months, the Filecoin network has made incredible progress:

1) Core protocol functionality . In August, we completed the second phase of the mainnet proof-of-stake trusted installer, launched the drand mainnet with partners such as Cloudflare and Ethereum, published a detailed article on Filecoin cryptoeconomics, and delivered a fully functional, Mainnet-ready Filecoin implementation, including Lotus 0.5.0, which supports storage and retrieval transactions in addition to storage mining.

2) Ecosystem growth . An impressive ecosystem of 85+ organizations are currently collaborating on the Filecoin network — building applications, developer tools, infrastructure, and more. The Filecoin Ignite series and hackathon accelerator have onboarded thousands of new community members who are learning, building, and launching projects on Filecoin. Programs include HackFS (run by EthGlobal), Spark University Hackathon (run by En[code] Club), Apollo (run by Gitcoin), and Filecoin Launchpad (run by Tachyon), which together have fostered over 230 new projects and over 1,000 talented new builders on Filecoin.

3) Storage Clients . As part of Space Race: Slingshot, many new storage clients have been enabled on the Filecoin network - including beautiful new clients like Slate, which allows users and applications to store and retrieve files. These clients are built on the trendy Filecoin developer APIs and tools, such as Fleek’s Storage Daemon, Textile’s Powergate, and Pinata’s upcoming Filecoin-powered IPFS Pinning Service.

4) Storage miners. Over the past 4 weeks, more than 400 miners in 34 countries and regions across 6 continents have added a staggering 325+PiB of storage capacity to the Filecoin network. This is enough to hold 90 million 1080p movies, 1,400 complete copies of Wikipedia, or 7 times all of humanity’s written works (in all languages) from the beginning of recorded history to today. This is truly an extraordinary achievement. Never in the history of the Internet has a community been able to coordinately amass such a large storage capacity in a trustless decentralized storage network.

2. Transition to Mainnet Ignition

Today, as we enter the mainnet ignition phase and prepare for the Filecoin mainnet liftoff, we are excited to share an update on the Filecoin launch phases and timeline. Launching a blockchain is a complex and lengthy process. Like many other networks, including Polkadot, NEAR, and others, Filecoin took a phased approach to mainnet launch, with different groups and communities joining the network over a period of time, leading to mainnet liftoff .

Over the next few weeks, various groups within the Filecoin community — including miners, clients, custodians, applications, network services, and more — will join the network ahead of mainnet liftoff. This pre-liftoff period, which we call mainnet ignition , gives network participants time to initialize, learn, set up their systems, and optimize their deployments. We’re all counting down, but that doesn’t mean the work is done. We still have a lot of prep work to do to set up the network for an amazing launch:

1) Storage Miners - Continue to add storage to the Ignition network in preparation for mainnet and stress test storage and retrieval transactions.

2) Clients and Applications - Participate in our ongoing space race, Slingshot, to leverage Filecoin’s decentralized storage power to provide useful, resilient data storage.

3) Custodians and Ecosystem Partners - Use this time to align operations and internal stakeholders onto the network.

4) SAFT Holders - Look for emails from CoinList and your chosen custodian on how to get set up on the network during the mainnet ignition phase prior to mainnet ignition. Implementation Developers - Increase testing, hardening, and interoperability across Filecoin implementations including lotus [PL], lin [ChainSafe], fuhon [Soramitsu], and go-filecoin [IPFSForce].

Mainnet ignition is also a time to solidify the many ways the Filecoin community can participate in network improvements and decision-making. Storage miners, community advocates, developers, clients, and ecosystem partners can all participate in enhancing the network through the open Filecoin Improvement Process, upgrading it through cross-implementation discussions in bi-weekly Core Devs meetings, and approving new changes through consensus among miners. Filecoin is feature-complete, but we expect the community to continue to improve and evolve the Filecoin network with software updates far more frequently than mainnet ignition.

3. Transition to Mainnet

Over the past month, the entire Filecoin ecosystem has been completely focused on Space Race — our multi-track incentivized testnet competition. This is a critical phase for the Filecoin project as it adjusts and upgrades the network in preparation for mainnet — and the entire ecosystem continues to gain valuable knowledge and operational expertise through large-scale, live stress testing.

Throughout Space Race, with over 500 miners utilizing over 325 PiB of storage in Orbital Burn and 265 client applications performing over 40,000 storage and retrieval transactions in Slingshot, together we have thoroughly exercised and tested the functionality, security, and resiliency of the network.

We’re excited to build on the solid foundation of Space Race to build the Filecoin network. A lot of work (both human and mechanical!) went into the storage capacity that now secures the Filecoin network and makes it decentralized. Early miners invested heavily in finding bugs, building operational expertise, and investing a lot of sealing and storage hardware into the network to lay the foundation. The Space Race testnet will continue to run and gradually move to mainnet over the next 3 weeks through protocol upgrades and state transitions, rather than setting up from scratch (and losing all storage capacity). There are still some improvements and state changes in our work before mainnet liftoff, but we’ll be framing this as a chain upgrade rather than a hard reset.

4. Countdown to Mainnet Launch

The culmination of all our efforts is coming. The Filecoin mainnet will officially start at epoch 148888! We expect this period to arrive around October 15th , which will begin a period of monitoring and problem solving to ensure that the network is healthy (working as expected) after the transition. After a few days of quiet, we will hold the Filecoin Mainnet Raise Event: a week-long event from October 19th to 23rd to celebrate the launch of the Filecoin mainnet. V丨ipfskefu

From cutting-edge cryptography research to complex protocol design and development discussions to the many sleepless nights debugging live networks during the Space Race, we have built amazing things together over the past three years. Launching a blockchain is like launching a software rocket, and it takes the entire interplanetary community to get to this point. Thank you for being a part of this epic journey!

We know that Filecoin mainnet launch is a highly anticipated milestone, so we want to give the community some special time. Excited for Filecoin? This week is the perfect time to hold online conferences, meetups, and events to celebrate launch and explore the future of the Filecoin network together. We can’t wait to join in on all the action the community has to celebrate Filecoin’s future success. If you’re planning a local meetup or event (where regional health regulations allow), get in touch with us!

Launching a new product, application, or service around Filecoin? Filecoin mainnet launch is a great time to highlight the amazing projects joining the network! Consider launching at a conference or meetup during launch, or even your own launch event!

5. Review of past launches

As with any rocket launch, liftoff is just the beginning. A rocket’s maximum dynamic pressure (MaxQ) is after it leaves the ground, not before it does. Similarly, our greatest challenges as a community lie ahead as we work to upgrade the protocol, support more demanding use cases, and add new features to our implementation. To withstand the pressures of a post-maintenance network, we must carefully plan our upgrade path, dynamically respond to issues, and come together as a diverse community to define the spirit, culture, and future of the Filecoin network. We have a sturdy launching pad, now it’s up to us to decide how to move forward among the stars.

It's been epic working with all of you to build this rocket - now let's get it ready for launch!