The Filecoin Space Race officially starts at 6:00 a.m. on August 25th, Beijing time!

Thanks to the extended calibration period, miners in the Space Race have many new tools (and better documentation!) to help them compete successfully.

Competitive Faucets: Our new and improved faucet helps miners to smoothly get their storage onto the network while avoiding pointless spam. We hope to simulate the real-world dynamics around effective gas and fee prices through fairly limited use of testnet FIL without causing too much trouble for large miners.

During the calibration period, we have made significant improvements to the faucet logic to seek reasonable settings. First, new addresses are assigned an address that is large enough to start sealing, but not too large to be easily abused. The reimbursement mechanism should meet most storage needs, and as more sectors are sealed, the mechanism can allocate more testnet FIL. Miners can periodically mine the faucet in daily operations to obtain more but small testnet FIL. Large miners may have multiple Github accounts to initialize their operations, but reimbursement should be fairly fast.

To receive testnet FIL from the faucet, miners must authenticate with a Github account older than 48 hours.

Miners can grant 100 testnet FIL to any address at one time.

Once a participant has an active miner actor, they can return to the faucet once every 24 hours to request additional requests for testnet FIL. 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 worker address.

This is separate from the one-time grant - miners can request both the one-time grant and the miner actor grant within the first 24 hours.

Additionally, for miners who can seal data at high speed, we have a faucet bot that sends reimbursement information of the initial pledge to the miner address in real time - enabling fast miners to continue to seal quickly.

(Note that this mechanism only applies to the Space Race, not the mainnet.)

Filecoin is a community-built network, and a healthy economy is built through collaboration, not abuse. This is a good first step toward collaboration before the Mainnet launch.

Connection Checker and Logs : Miners can check their dialability and connection status on the dashboard to ensure that they can successfully receive storage and retrieval transactions. For miners experiencing connection issues, refer to the Filecoin documentation to ensure your storage miner is configured correctly. In order to track and debug any problems with storage and retrieval transactions, miners can also search for their miners and view logs of all requests from competition bots here.

Transaction filtering : If a miner receives many transactions from other clients, resulting in poor success for the competing bot, it can use the transaction acceptance criteria described in the Space Race FAQ to only accept transactions from specified clients. The client IDs for the competing bots can be found at spacerace.filecoin.io.

Documentation : Based on the challenges observed in calibrating the network, we’ve added a lot of new documentation to help miners onboard smoothly. See the new pages for miner troubleshooting, improving connectivity, and Space Race FAQs. We also have a lot of great suggestions for more documentation improvements from the community, so expect to see more updates here as the team works on these over the next few days.