Space Race 1 is coming to an end, Phase 2 is about to start, and the mainnet is about to be launched

Highlights of Space Race 1

Over the past 3 weeks, miners in the community have been participating in the Filecoin Space Race to equip the testnet with as much storage as possible. We are excited about the amazing participation in the Space Race. More than 356 miners from 32 countries across six continents participated, including miners from Nairobi, Kenya, Auckland, New Zealand, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Oslo, Norway, and Shenzhen, China.

Participant participation far exceeded initial expectations, and miners quickly reached 200 PiB of storage space, which is 2 times the original Space Race goal! More importantly, the Space Race enabled a massive upgrade of the Filecoin protocol and early implementations. The rapid upload of data in the Space Race helped determine improvements in chain throughput, data sealing resilience, message pool spam protection, and worker selection logic to help Filecoin support more miners and data capacity.

We have also learned from the thousands of storage and retrieval transactions that the storage robot performs every day, and have made significant optimizations to the transaction process, while adding many new APIs, better default settings, and monitoring tools to improve miner usability. You can learn more about all the exciting events of the space race by watching the weekly report and other events.

One of the main goals of Space Race is to prepare the Filecoin network and operators for the levels of usage, traffic, and performance we’ll see on mainnet over time.

The final week included an important network stress testing process, including chain upgrades, drand downtime, and status 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 it takes to do coordinated upgrades, what tools are needed to simplify upgrades, and how operators can recover from issues quickly and safely. Now that we have version dashboards, checkpoint compliance logic, and snapshot export tools, thank you all for participating in the testing!

Many thanks to the entire community for such amazing competition so far. We are honored to build this network with you. Hopefully we reach the epic 200 PiB milestone and rewards tiers!

Bringing the community together

The community response and conversation has been amazing! We’ve seen and heard from hundreds of people around the world participating in Space Race. Miners have written dozens of articles, participated in 3 AMAs, and 9 Filecoin miners have presented at 3 Show-and-Tells. There are over 1,205 community members active in the #space-race Slack channel, sparking discussions about all things Filecoin. 11 particularly helpful people received community awards for their outstanding contributions. The community engagement and momentum is amazing !

Participants received a lot of feedback throughout the Space Race, resulting in many Lotus features, protocol adjustments, blockchain explorer improvements, new tools, and more. Your ideas and feedback are valuable because they guide the project and guide the development of many products across the ecosystem. Some requests pointed in conflicting directions, which is completely normal in a large blockchain community like ours. But the data also showed some strong common themes.

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

Miners and developers want more time to test and tweak. A large number of miners and developers are asking for more time to test and improve everything: miner hardware deployment, miner software systems, Filecoin mining UX, Filecoin implementation bugs, protocol parameter adjustments, economic models for large and small miners, etc. How much time they want varies: some want a week, some want a few months. Many people say, "We want another Space Race!"

Miners want more opportunities to earn rewards! During the Space Race, miners gained extensive experience and knowledge on how to build 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 to deploy. "More Space Race! More rewards!"

Miners want to improve message throughput and PoSt reliability. High chain congestion caused many adverse effects during the space race. Failures became difficult to recover during chain congestion, causing miners to struggle during upgrades, DDOS attacks, and planned testing outages. WindowPost, failures, blockchain congestion, and selfish packaging are manageable individually, but become difficult when they are mixed and amplified. Continuing large-scale testing and iteration on the network can help us improve this.

Miners and developers are hoping for more time to improve transactions. The network as a whole has managed to achieve a good overall success rate for storage transactions and retrieval transactions, with many miners achieving near-perfect success rates! Well done! But there are still some challenges for miners: network issues, firewall issues, bugs, ISP and VPN issues, and more. We still have a lot of room for improvement in order to provide a robust, distributed global storage network. We haven't made storing user data a major part of the competition, so many miners and users are asking for more testing and improvements to these processes. "Can we have a space race for clients and applications?"

Miners and developers want to use sectors proven in Space Race in mainnet. The 195PiB of capacity proven in Space Race to date has been an extremely valuable asset to the Filecoin project. We want to use sectors proven in Space Race on mainnet. The superior storage capacity distribution in Space Race means we can start with a large amount of storage capacity, fully dispersed across hundreds of participants, improving network security. This is also a request we have received from many miners who have spent a lot of resources, money, and effort on sealing 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.

Running another Space Race right now is asking a lot of miners, developers, and Space Race staff – and after 3 fast-paced and intense weeks, many of us are exhausted! Space Race is a daunting and extremely challenging undertaking for everyone. Miners have to get their entire operations up and running, learn how everything works, improve and optimize their operations, properly manage issues and stress testing, and more. We developed a lot of custom software, created competition programs, put on events, staff channels 24/7 to help people get started and troubleshoot issues, and more. These programs take a lot of time to plan, implement, and participate in. However, given the valuable opportunity and the strong demand, we have decided to give the community what they asked for. ❤️