Filecoin officially announces the second round of space race

Professionalism and focus, win-win cooperation

Space Race Highlights

Over the past three weeks, miners from across the community have participated in the Filecoin Space Race to get as much storage as possible onto Testnet. We are excited about the amazing participation in the Space Race. More than 356 miners from 32 countries across six continents participated, including miners in Nairobi, Kenya, Auckland, New Zealand, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Oslo, Norway, and Shenzhen, China.

The rate of participation has far exceeded initial expectations, with miners quickly approaching 200PiB of storage , double the original competition target! More importantly, the Space Race has enabled massive upgrades and early implementations of the Filecoin protocol.

During the Space Race, fast data ingestion rates help determine improvements to chain throughput, data sealing resiliency, message pool spam protection, and worker selection logic to help Filecoin support more miners and data capacity.

We’ve also made significant optimizations to the transaction process, learning from the thousands of storage and retrieval transactions made daily by competing storage bots—while adding many new APIs, better defaults, and monitoring tools to improve miner usability. You can learn more about the exciting things happening in the Space Race by watching the weekly coverage and other events.

One of the main goals of Space Race is to get the Filecoin network and operators up to speed on the usage, traffic, and performance levels we’re likely to see on the big web.

The final week included an important stress testing process for the network, including chain upgrades, drand outages, and state updates. Preparing everyone for these real-world challenges will help the network handle a variety of situations smoothly - which will make the Filecoin mainnet stronger and more resilient.

As a community, we learned a lot from these stress tests: how much time we need to do coordinated upgrades, what tools we need to simplify these upgrades, and how operators can recover quickly and safely from issues. Thanks to this testing, we now have version dashboards, checkpoint compliance logic, and snapshot export tools!

Thank you for your contribution to such an extraordinary competition. We are honored to build this network with you, and hopefully we can reach the epic 200PiB milestone and reward tiers!

Bringing the community together

The community response and conversation has been amazing! We have seen and heard from hundreds of people from around the world who participated in Space Race. Miners have written dozens of blog posts, participated in 3 AMAs, and 9 Filecoin miners participated in 3 showcase events. Over 1,205 community members are active in the space-race Slack channel. Participants in the community will receive community rewards in particular. The level of participation from the global community is amazing!

Throughout the Space Race, participants have generated a ton of feedback, leading to many lotus features, protocol tweaks, chain explorer improvements, new tooling, and more. Your ideas and feedback are valuable because they guide the project and inform the development of many products across the ecosystem. Some requests point in conflicting directions—perfectly normal in a large blockchain community like ours. But the data also shows some strong common themes.

Among the many insights and feedback, five big requests led to today’s post:

1. Miners and developers need more time to test and tune.

A large number of miners and developers are asking for more time to test and improve everything around: miner hardware deployment, miner software systems, filecoin mining UX, filecoin implementation bugs, protocol parameter tuning, economic models for large and small miners, etc. Miners' time requirements vary: some ask for a week, some ask for months. Many people say: "We want another space race!"

2. Miners want more opportunities to earn rewards.

During the Space Race, miners gained extensive experience and knowledge on how to set up and manage storage mining operations. Now that miners know how to do this, many are looking for additional rewards to improve operations or purchase more hardware for deployment. "More Space Race! More rewards!"

3. Mining information throughput and PoSt reliability are improved.

During the space race, high chain congestion caused many undesirable effects. During periods of chain congestion, failures became difficult to recover from, causing miners to struggle during upgrades, DDOS attacks, and planned testing outages. Windows, errors, chain jams, and selfish wraps are manageable on their own, but when they are compounded and amplified, things become difficult. Continuous testing and iteration on a large-scale network can help us improve this.

4. Miners and developers want more time to improve transaction matching.

The network as a whole is achieving good storage transaction and retrieval transaction success rates, with many miners achieving near-perfect success rates! Great work! But miners are facing some challenges: network issues, firewall issues, vulnerabilities, ISP and VPN issues, and more. We still have a lot of room for improvement in providing a robust, decentralized global storage network. We don't make storing user data a major part of the competition, so many miners and users are asking for more testing and improvements to these. "Can we have a space race for clients and applications?"

5. Miners and developers want to use the Space Race sector in the main network.

The 195pib of capacity proven so far in Space Race is a very valuable asset to the Filecoin project. We want to use sectors that were proven in the mainnet Space Race. The excellent distribution of storage power in Space Race means that we can start with a large amount of storage power, fully dispersed among hundreds of participants, thereby improving network security. This is also a request we have received from many miners who have spent a lot of resources, money, and energy to seal Space Race sectors. Being able to use these sectors for the long term will make their participation more valuable and will greatly improve the security of the mainnet.

Now, many miners are asking to do another Space Race, and most of the developers and Space Race staff are exhausted after three weeks of fast-paced and intense Space Race! Space Race is a huge and challenging task for everyone. Miners have to build and run their entire operations, learn how everything works, improve and optimize their operations, properly manage issues and stress testing, and so on.

We developed a lot of custom software, produced contests, hosted events, staffed various channels 24⁄7 to help people get started, etc. These projects require a lot of time to plan, implement, and participate. However, given the valuable opportunity and strong demand, we decided to give the community what they asked for.

Space Race 2 Introduction

We’re excited to introduce Space Race 2 (or SR2)! Based on all the feedback, we’ve decided to create a second phase of the competition, building on the massive network developed during the Space Race. This gives us the opportunity to continue testing and improving Filecoin on a large-scale network as we prepare for mainnet.

SR2 will compete on tracks in two areas. Specifically, it will include the following:

• Orbit 1: SR2 - Orbital burn.

Provide a track for storage miners to continue testing and scaling the network. This will pick up where Space Race 1 ended. This track is described below.

• Track 2: SR2-Slingshot.

Track for Filecoin clients, application developers, and tool developers to deploy their products to testnet. This track will encourage clients and miners to make storage and retrieval deals and help Filecoin storage users prepare for mainnet. This track will be described in a blog post early next week.

Track 1: SR2 - orbital burn

In SR2: orbitalburn, miners will receive additional rewards for maintaining and increasing their hashrate. However, miners do not need to compete to reach large storage targets within a limited time in order to increase the prize pool. This structure allows miners to grow their storage at their own pace. We hope this allows time to rest and regroup after the intense competition of SR1. Here is a preview of the SR2: orbital burn competition rules. The final rules will be published on the website.

· Target

o Proper economic simulation: The main goal of SR2 is to create testing conditions as close to the mainnet as possible. SR1 focused primarily on raw byte storage capacity, while other economic factors such as block rewards and gas fees will play a more realistic role in SR2.

o Proper Market Simulation: In SR1, trading success was measured by a very limited set of trades. SR2 will reward both dealbot trades and storage customer trades as we move towards our primary goal of building a robust, global, decentralized storage network for human information.

· award

o Mainnet Sectors : Miners who successfully maintain or grow their sectors in SR2 will be able to transfer/preload their sectors to a portion of Mainnet. This means that storage capacity gained in Space Race 1 and Space Race 2 will directly increase your storage capacity in preparation for Mainnet launch.

o Sector Pledge Bonds: Additionally, miners who successfully maintain their sectors in SR2 will get those sectors preloaded into the main board with the corresponding pledge bond agreements covering them. As of the date of this post, this is over 4.5 million tokens — more than the rewards in SR1! We expect this will be a huge reward for miners who have been deeply involved in Filecoin for months and years.

o Won FIL Bonus Pool for Block Rewards and Gas Fees: At the end of SR2, miners will receive a portion of the bonus pool, proportional to the testnet FIL they earned, as block rewards and gas fees. This is to provide strong economic incentives to package blocks appropriately. After SR2 ends, the SR2 organizers will choose the proportion to better understand the distribution of the entire amount.

Other details

o Duration: 3 weeks (September 14th - October 5th). We are still finalizing the timing, but our goal is to run SR2 for three weeks as everyone prepares for the mainnet launch. We may extend or shorten the duration of SR2 depending on how preparations for the mainnet go.

o Failures: Normal failure and recovery conditions apply: sectors are considered present until they are completely terminated (many consecutive failures).

o No storage capacity target reward pool: At this time, we do not plan to have any storage capacity target reward pool for SR2.

o Open entry without miner registration: No registration is required this time, anyone can create a miner account, start mining, and finally earn storage. (Note: If prizes are added, registration may be required to receive non-departmental/incidental prizes).

o Transaction Success Rate: We will continue to require transaction success rate to qualify as a measure of transaction bots. Transaction success has always been one of the most challenging metrics for miners, but it has produced huge improvements to the storage and retrieval market and implementations.

o Proof Submission Reimbursement: We plan to continue running the compensation faucet at a reduced capacity during SR2 so that miners who wish to increase storage can continue to grow. If there is any abuse, attempted deception, or other issues, we will shut it down or limit its reimbursement.

o New User Faucet: We will restore the new user faucet (OAuth via github), but with more conservative parameters. If there is any abuse, attempted deception, or other problems, we will shut it down or limit its compensation.

Thank you for your participation

We have often wanted to include Space Race storage in the mainnet to support network initialization, providing a large amount of useful and well-decentralized storage capacity. We hope that SR2 will achieve this and stress-test more avenues, including economic incentive conditions, closer to those expected in mainnet.

Thank you so much for your participation in SR1. It has been a wonderful and rewarding experience for all of us, and we have accomplished many great things together.

We have accumulated nearly 200PiB of storage, building a novel blockchain through a decentralized storage network! We have created a huge distributed storage facility. While not yet as big as the large centralized cloud computing companies, we are well on our way - this is our challenge for the next few years.

Good luck getting to the end of SR1! Good luck with SR2!