Official: Filecoin SR2 Track Guide

Professionalism and focus, win-win cooperation

Congratulations to everyone who participated in Space Race (SR1 for short)! This was truly an amazing event, and a true testament to the breadth, depth, and commitment of the Filecoin mining community.

SR2 is a race with two tracks:

Track 1: SR2 - Orbital Burn: A track to allow storage miners to continue testing and scale the network. This will continue where Space Race 1 left off.

Track 2: SR2 - Slingshot: A track for Filecoin clients, application developers, and tool developers to deploy their products to the testnet. This track will encourage clients and miners to make storage and retrieval transactions and help Filecoin storage users prepare for the mainnet.

This post focuses on SR2 - Slingshot! If you are a miner and want to participate in SR2 Orbital Burn, please read this post. SR2 Slingshot is only available to storage clients and developers.

What is SR2-Sling shot?

We are excited to announce SR2-Sling shot! While SR1 was focused on miners, the Filecoin network is a multi-dimensional network with many key stakeholders and audiences. We are excited to invite storage clients, application developers, tool providers, and many other community members who contribute to the network!

SR2 Slingshot is a community competition for storage clients and developers that rewards the storage of real, valuable, and usable data on the Filecoin Space Race network (testnet). The stakes are high: over the course of the event, eligible participants will compete for prizes of up to 500,000 FIL. The more real, valuable, and useful data you have on the Filecoin network, the more FIL you earn!

With SR2-Slingshot, we hope to achieve the following:

● Maximize the number of valuable applications storing real data on the Filecoin network. We want to see your product or application live on the Filecoin network. If you are building an application on Filecoin, IPFS, and/or the Textile stack, or want to build something new, we encourage you to participate in the competition!

● Transfer real data to the Filecoin network and ensure it is discoverable, retrievable, and usable. We want to see you bring real data to the Filecoin network. But the challenge is not just loading large data volumes onto Filecoin. It’s also about ensuring that your application and other applications can discover, retrieve, and use the data. Note that since many SR2 storage sectors will remain on the mainnet, Slingshot is also a good opportunity to ensure that data is stored on the Filecoin network when the mainnet launches.

● Strengthen the Filecoin storage client and developer community. We want to create an event for the storage client and developer community to connect and achieve ambitious goals. We will do everything we can to ensure your team successfully brings real data and useful applications to the Filecoin network.

Phase 1 of the competition will begin on September 23, 2020 at 11:00 UTC and end on October 14, 2020 at 11:00 UTC. Read on for more details on how to participate.

How do I participate in the Slingshot competition?

To participate in the Slingshot competition, you must store real, valuable, and usable data to the Filecoin network. You must also build an application or UI that uses that data in a meaningful way (whether reading data directly from Filecoin or reading data from a data cache stored elsewhere, such as IPFS). There are many ways to store data to Filecoin and build these applications and UIs. You can learn more about these paths in the Developer Guide section below.

The so-called “real, valuable and usable data” refers to:

1. Application Data: You can build end-user facing applications to store application and user data to Filecoin. The application UI is able to retrieve relevant data as needed.

2. Data Collections: You can store data from a curated list of data collections maintained by the Slingshot admin team and create an accompanying UI to use/access this data.

The main channels for Slingshot competitions are:

● Slingshot website and leaderboard:

https://slingshot.filecoin.io

This website is the source of truth for the entire Slingshot competition. It includes information about the general competition purpose, rules, events and procedures, a registration form, and a leaderboard. The leaderboard maintains the total size of the reward pool based on the combined efforts of Slingshot participants. It also provides a list of participants, their eligibility status, and potential rewards.

● Slingshot Library:

https://github.com/filecoin-project/slingshot You can submit a PR in this repository to get your project details included in the Slingshot leaderboard. Community reviewers will leave feedback directly in the submitted PR. The Slingshot management team also maintains a curated list of datasets in this repository.

● Slack:

We use the following Slack channels in the Filecoin Project Slack workspace to provide Slingshot announcements and help debug any issues.

If you enter the competition, please make sure you are included in the following channels:

#fil-testnet-announce – Important announcements about testnet and major software releases

#slingshot-announcements – Major announcements about the Slingshot program

#slingshot – for debugging help and community conversation throughout the race

To register for the contest and be eligible for rewards, please complete the following steps:

1. Slack: Join the Filecoin Project Slack workspace and the following channels:

# fil-testnet-announce

#slingshot-announcement

#slingshot

2. Start your project:

Decide what data you want to store to Filecoin, what application or UI you want to interact with it, and what technology stack you want to use (see the Developer Guide section for more information). Once you successfully complete your first storage transaction to the Filecoin network, the Filecoin address you used to make the storage transaction will automatically appear in the leaderboard. However, your project will not be able to receive rewards yet.

3. Register to participate: Complete two registration steps:

Submit a registration form with your team information at https://slingshot.filecoin.io/register.

Submit a PR to the filecoin-project/slingshot GitHub repository with information about your project, app/UI URLs, etc. The repo contains templates and submission instructions.

4. Pass community review:

The Slingshot team of community reviewers will review your project details in the filecoin-project/slingshot GitHub repository to ensure that you are eligible to participate in the competition. They will provide feedback to your team in your PR. If your application is accepted, the review team will merge the PR, update the leaderboard with only your project information (no personal information), and mark your project as "reviewed" on the leaderboard. If your application is not accepted immediately, the review team will ask you for more information, which you can provide by updating the PR.

5. Comply with the rules of the competition:

If you have completed the previous steps and have followed the contest rules throughout the contest, you will be eligible for rewards. These rules are checked automatically by the Slingshot leaderboard software, or in some cases manually by Slingshot community reviewers. If you are eligible for rewards, the leaderboard will mark your project as "Eligible". Please note that if an eligible project does not follow the contest rules for a long time, it will be eligible for rewards throughout the contest.

Participants should expect to improve their applications/UIs and grow data storage on Filecoin throughout the competition. The Slingshot leaderboard will be the source of truth throughout the competition, so keep an eye on this leaderboard to ensure your project is properly represented there.

Competition Rules

1. Ranking list:

To appear on the Slingshot leaderboard, you must submit at least 1 successful transaction to the Filecoin network.

To be listed as “reviewed” on the leaderboard, you must submit a registration form on the Slingshot website, submit a PR to the filecoin-project/slingshot GitHub repository, and pass community review.

NOTE: Appearing on the leaderboard does not automatically qualify you for rewards.

2. Award qualifications:

In order to be eligible for any Slingshot rewards and be listed as "Qualified" on the leaderboard, you must meet the following requirements. These requirements are checked automatically by the Slingshot leaderboard, or manually by the community moderation team throughout the competition.

● You must store real, valuable, and usable data to the Filecoin network. This can be application data or a collection of data (from the list maintained by the Slingshot team here).

● You must build an application or UI that uses the data in a meaningful way. You must submit this application or UI in the contest, and it needs to work.

● Your project must pass community review to confirm that your project is legal. If a team that has been reviewed fails to comply with the competition rules continuously, it may be disqualified from participating in the entire competition.

● You must make a storage deal with at least 3 miners on the SR2 network.

● You must store each CID so that it can be retrieved from the Filecoin network. We will test CID retrieval regularly throughout the competition.

● You must attend the Slingshot Showcase.

3. Display:

We are organizing a Slingshot Showcase to highlight the work done by all Slingshot participants over the course of the competition.

● Each of the top 100 qualified participants on the leaderboard will record a presentation of their project for the Slingshot Showcase.

● In addition, the top 10 qualified participants on the leaderboard will be invited to give live demonstrations of their projects at a live Showcase event.

● We will release these Showcase Demos and specific criteria for the demos at the end of Week 2 of the competition.

4. Disqualification:

Your team may be disqualified at any point during the contest if you are ineligible for rewards, violate contest rules, or are caught compromising in any way. You may not plagiarize other projects. Leaderboard results will not be truly final until shortly after the contest ends. The Slingshot Admin team will aggregate all data from the leaderboard and community reviewers to determine final eligibility at the end of the contest and the final contest winner.

5. We reserve the right to change the competition rules as needed to ensure a healthy competition dynamic.

Community Exchange

Slingshot community reviewers are members of the Filecoin community who have demonstrated that they are deeply invested in the long-term health of the Filecoin network. Community reviewers come from different stakeholder communities - some storage miners, some developer tool builders, some application developers, and more. Once we finalize the community review team's review, we'll publish it on the Slingshot website!

Slingshot community reviewers will review submitted PRs on multiple fronts. Some of the criteria they will review include:

● Does the project follow the Filecoin Project Code of Conduct?

● Does the project store real and usable data?

● How does the project plan to structure and store the data? What are the data sizes and dataset details?

● Does the project seem achievable?

● Does the application/UI plan make sense?

If your project is accepted, the reviewer will merge your PR, update the leaderboard with your project information, and mark your project as "Reviewed".

If your project is not immediately accepted, the reviewers will provide feedback in the PR for revisions they would like to see reconsidered.

award

SR2-Slingshot builds on the collaborative and competitive dynamics of SR1. Slingshot distributes a prize pool among all participants. The size of the prize pool is determined by the total amount of data stored on the network. The prize pool is distributed to participants in proportion to the amount of data stored on the network by their project or application.

Slingshot will be divided into two phases:

● Phase 1: Onboarding. The initial phase of the competition will begin on September 23, 2020. The goal of this phase is to onboard the first PiB of real data onto the Filecoin network!

● Phase 2: Scale. Phase 2 will begin after Phase 1 is completed. The goal of this phase is to scale the data on the FilePiin network from 1PiB to 10PiB. After Phase 1 is completed, we will determine the exact timing of Phase 2.

● We may increase the prize pool or adjust the stages as needed depending on the pace of the tournament!

Current Reward Pool:

Here is an example showing how rewards are distributed at the end of a contest:

● There are four participants in the competition:

A stores 5TiB of data, has passed the community review phase, and is listed as “Qualified” on the leaderboard.

B stores 5.5TiB of application data, passed the community review stage, and is listed as “Qualified” on the leaderboard.

C stores 5TiB of application data but fails the community review stage and is not reviewed or ineligible on the leaderboard.

D stored 0.5TiB of data and passed the community review. However, D stored all data in the network for 6 months and therefore did not meet all reward eligibility requirements. D is listed as audited, but ineligible on the leaderboard.

● In this case, C and D are not eligible for rewards in the Slingshot competition. This is because C did not pass the community review phase, and D only stored its data for 6 months, not 1 year. Therefore, only A and B's storage counts towards competition rewards.

● Between A and B, the collective storage is 5 + 5.5 = 10.5TiB of eligible storage. This will unlock the lowest level 10,000 FIL reward pool.

● Since A and B are the only eligible winners, they divide the reward pool between them proportionally:

Total data size = 5 + 5.5 TiB = 10.5 TiB

A’s portion of the reward pool = (5/10.5) * 10,000 FIL = ~4,762 FIL

B’s portion of the reward pool = (5.5/10.5) * 10,000 FIL = ~5,238 FIL

● Both C and D are not eligible for rewards and receive 0 FIL.

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

Developer Guide

There are many ways to store data on the Filecoin network and build applications/UIs on top of this data. The most popular technology stacks for developers are:

● Powergate. Powergate is a multi-layer file storage API built on Filecoin and IPFS, and is an index generator for Filecoin data. It is designed to be modular and extensible. You can use Powergate to store data to IPFS and Filecoin, and Powergate will retrieve the CID from the hottest storage layer for the data available (which may be a local cache, IPFS, or finally Filecoin). Running Powergate requires managing your own IPFS and Filecoin Lotus nodes.

● Textile Hub. Textile Hub is the fastest way to start building and experimenting with Textile technology. It provides persistent IFPS endpoints for hosted buckets and threads. It includes developer accounts for individuals and organizations and integrating API keys into your applications. If you choose to use Textile Hub with a hosted bucket for your application, you can archive your entire bucket to the Filecoin network with a single command.

● Managed Powergate. Managed Powergate offers the same functionality as Powergate, but the infrastructure is managed by the Textile team. Instead of managing your own IPFS and Filecoin Lotus nodes, Textile manages these for you, while your team retains full control and full access to the managed instance.

● Lotus. Lotus is the reference Filecoin protocol implementation. Building applications directly on Lotus is the most bare-metal option available to developers. It requires managing your own node and the complexity of storage deal proposals and management on Filecoin.

There is no single correct way to store data or build applications/UIs on the Filecoin network. However, we recommend the following for developers:

We do not recommend that developers who are primarily interested in Filecoin's data storage and retrieval capabilities build directly on top of Lotus. This is because the Lotus functionality is fairly low-level, and developers have easier products to work with. Additionally, a Lotus node alone cannot retrieve data directly from the IPFS network. Because Filecoin's retrieval performance is significantly slower than IPFS, it is often used as a backup storage solution. If developers use Lotus nodes directly for storage and retrieval, the use cases for the application/UI will be greatly limited.

● Developers who want to store data and retrieve it quickly should use Powergate, Hosted Powergate, or Textile Hub. This is especially true if the data you want to store to Filecoin is already on IPFS. These solutions allow you to back up your data to cooler storage provided by Filecoin and retrieve data from hotter storage layers like IPFS.

● Developers who want to store data (not dependent on retrieval speed) should still use Powergate, Hosted Powergate, or Textile Hub for a better developer experience than using Lotus directly. However, you can choose not to pin your data to IPFS, saving on storage and bandwidth costs.

● Developers who are developing developer tools and products (such as chain explorers) should build directly on top of Lotus.

If you have any questions about the tech stack used for your application or how to set it up, feel free to ask via Slack or by emailing [email protected]!

grateful

We are really excited to launch SR2 Slingshot and scale the applications built and the amount of real data stored on humanity’s largest decentralized storage network. Thank you to the storage client, developer, and mining communities for making this network awesome! Special thanks to our community auditors for making it possible for us to run programs like Slingshot for the Filecoin network and ecosystem.