The countdown to the launch of the Space Race mainnet has begun!

Statement: The article content and pictures are from the IPFS official website ipfs.io. The time involved is US time. Lingdong Company only translated/organized/moved it.

The Filecoin testnet rewards program has been launched at 6 am on August 25! In the next 3 weeks, as more and more storage space is submitted, miners on the Filecoin testnet will compete for a bonus of up to 4 million FIL.

Over the past month we’ve seen over 240 miners from 5 continents ready to participate — reaching a sealing rate of 1TiB/second (15PiB sealed in 3 days)! A huge thank you to all the miners for helping diagnose issues, proposing fixes, and stress-testing the network in exciting ways.

Now, it’s time to start everyone’s engines. Lotus has frozen the code for this competition. At the same time, in preparation for the Space Race, the Filecoin testnet has been reset, and we have officially merged the "next" branch into "master".

(https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/commits/master).

Epoch 0 will start on time at 10:00 am on August 25th, Beijing time, and genesis will be released about 2 hours in advance to allow miners to prepare.

Let’s start the countdown!

competition

Space Race is a collaborative competition designed to stress-test the network, encourage participation from miners around the world, and help prepare miners to run the world's largest decentralized storage network. During this 3-week competition, miners compete to onboard as much storage capacity as possible to the network.

The top 100 miners worldwide, and the top 50 miners on each continent, will receive Filecoin rewards based on the amount of storage they and the network achieve during the competition. Once the competition goes live, you can track progress at spacerace.filecoin.io.

In addition to submitting storage capacity, the 20 largest block reward winners will receive an additional 100,000 FIL in proportion to the amount of block rewards they receive. Once the network is launched, you can track the ranking of this award at reward.testnet.fildev.network.

Space Race Qualification

Filecoin's goal is to create a distributed, efficient, and powerful foundation for humanity's information. Successfully achieving this goal requires a global network of miners who can demonstrate responsible stewardship of customer data.

Therefore, in order to qualify for the Space Race, participating miners must respond to the storage and retrieval transaction requests of the competition robot, maintaining a storage and retrieval transaction success rate of more than 80%. The robot will begin to trade with miners who successfully sealed sectors within 12-24 hours after the competition starts, and will continue to make transaction requests throughout the competition.

To prove that they can perform the entire sector lifecycle (commit, upgrade, and terminate sectors), participants must perform at least one committed capacity sector upgrade during the competition to be eligible for rewards. See Filecoin documentation:

(https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/spacerace/#how-do-i-demonstrate-a-sector-upgrade).

Miners will be able to query their transaction success rate and sector lifecycle status in the spacerace.filecoin.io dashboard. For more details on the rules and eligibility requirements, see the [Space Race Documentation and FAQ]

(https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/spacerace/)

Please join the #space-race channel on the Filecoin slack for the latest race updates, and join #fil-testnet once the race starts for network/debugging issues!

Incentive Program Calibration Period

Since late July, we have been running a Space Race "calibration" network for miners to practice under real competition conditions and understand how their performance affects hypothetical competition rankings. The calibration period is an important addition to ensure that miners participating in the Space Race can meet the qualification criteria through successful storage and retrieval transactions, and that the network is stable enough.

During the calibration period, network functionality and performance were also greatly improved. New features introduced by the calibration development network include: upgrading the committed space with real transactions, storing multiple transactions in a sector, requesting fast retrieval from miners through plaintext copies, and paying FIL for successful transactions through payment channels. With [EIP1559]

(https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1559.md)Similarly, Verification Network also introduced on-chain resource burning gas fees for message execution consumption, and enabled message senders to pay priority fees directly to miners who generated blocks, which is not linked to gas usage.

A big thank you to the great community in the #fil-net-calibration channel on the [Filecoin slack](http://filecoin.io/slack) for their help with network upgrades over the past few weeks! If you’re not happy with your ranking yet, you still have a few days to fix any last minute issues. Make sure you’ve updated to the latest calibration network to ensure you’re ready to start Space Race on Monday.

Joining the Space Race

Thanks to the calibration period, miners in the Space Race have a lot of new tools (and better documentation!) to help them participate successfully in the competition.

Competition Faucet: Our new and improved [faucet](http://faucet.calibration.fildev.network/)

It can help miners smoothly add their storage to the network while avoiding meaningless hoarding or spam. We hope to simulate the real-life dynamics based on effective gas and fee prices by fairly limiting access to testnet FIL without causing undue inconvenience to large miners.

During the calibration period, we significantly evolved the faucet logic to try to find a reasonable setting. Initially, new addresses will be allocated an amount that is enough to start sealing, but not too much to be abused. Most storage submission requirements should be met by the compensation mechanism. The more sectors are sealed, the more testnet FIL is allocated.

Miners can use the faucet regularly to obtain a small amount of testnet FIL for daily operations. Larger miners may need to use multiple Github accounts to initialize their operations, but the compensation will be sufficient after a while.

To receive testnet FIL from the faucet, miners must authenticate using a Github account that has been registered for at least 48 hours. Miners can receive 100 testnet FIL at a time, which can be sent to any address. Once a participant has an active miner, they can make a testnet FIL request to the faucet once every 24 hours. The first of these requests will return 1,000 testnet FIL, and subsequent requests will return 200 testnet FIL.

To receive these top-ups, enter your miner ID in the faucet and the funds will be sent to the miner address. This is separate from the one-time subsidy - so miners can apply for both the one-time subsidy and the miner subsidy at the same time within the first 24 hours.

In addition, for miners who can package data at high speed, we have a faucet robot that will send the initial pledge compensation to the miner address in real time - allowing fast miners to continue to package quickly. (Note that this mechanism will only exist in the space race, not the main network).

Filecoin is a community-based network where a healthy economy is built through cooperation, not abuse. This is the first exercise in good cooperation before the mainnet launch.

Network connection check and logs: Miners can check the network connection and logs in the dashboard

(https://calibration.spacerace.filecoin.io/check)

Check your connectivity and network status on Filecoin to ensure that you can successfully receive storage and retrieval transactions. Miners who encounter connectivity issues should check the [Filecoin documentation](https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/connectivity) to ensure that your storage miner is configured correctly. To track and debug any issues with storage and retrieval transactions, miners can also search their miners and view all request logs from competition bots.

(https://calibration.spacerace.filecoin.io)

Transaction filtering: If a miner receives a large number of transactions from other clients, resulting in a low success rate for the competition bot, the miner can use the filter described in the Space Race FAQ.

(https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/spacerace/#how-do-i-prioritize-deals-from-competition-bots)

The transaction acceptance criteria is to only accept transactions from the specified client. The client ID of the competition robot will be provided at _spacerace.filecoin.io_.

Documentation: Based on the challenges we discovered while calibrating the network, we have added a lot of new documentation to help miners join smoothly. See

• [Miner troubleshooting]

(https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/)

• [Improve connection]

(https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/connectivity/)

• Space Race FAQ

(https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/spacerace/#frequently-asked-questions)

Please join us for the Space Race Opening Ceremony on August 27 at 6:00 AM PDT. We will celebrate the start of the Space Race and feature presentations from our team.

The Space Race will also host a series of events for participants.

Weekly seminars are held at 9:00 am Beijing time on Wednesday.

8/26: Filecoin Mining Workshop #1 - How to Troubleshoot Common Issues 9/2: Filecoin Mining Workshop #2 - Improvements and New Features 9/9: Filecoin Mining Workshop #3 - Getting Ready for Mainnet

• Every Thursday at 9am: Filecoin team live AMA

• Every Friday morning at 9:00 am: Miners’ presentation

• Every Saturday at 8am: Space Race Report

Other in-depth discussions on topics such as Filecoin’s crypto-economics, mining cluster configuration, and more will be scheduled throughout the competition.

All events will be recorded and available online. If you would like to attend the miner presentations, please join the [Filecoin slack]

(http://filecoin.io/slack)

Please visit the #space-race channel on , where we will send out the registration link next week.

We’re looking forward to Space Race to get started – and are very proud of the great progress we’ve made together over the past few weeks.