Filecoin Space Race will start on August 25

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The Filecoin Testnet Rewards Program officially launches on Monday, August 24th at 10pm UTC (3pm PT | 6am CST on Tuesday, August 25th)! Over the next 3 weeks, miners on the Filecoin Testnet will compete for up to 4M FIL in bounties as they race to stake as much storage as possible. Over the past month, we’ve seen over 240 miners from 5 continents gear up to participate — and reach a sealing rate of 1TiB/sec (15PiB sealed in 3 days)! Big thanks to all the miners for their help in diagnosing issues, proposing solutions, and stress-testing the network in an exciting way.

Now, it’s time to start your engines. The “next” branch is officially merged into “master” in preparation for resetting the Filecoin Testnet to kick off the Space Race. Epoch will begin at 10pm UTC on Monday, August 24th, with the genesis being released approximately 2 hours in advance for miners to use.

Space Race is a collaborative competition designed to stress-test the network, encourage participation from around the world, and help miners prepare to run the world’s largest decentralized storage network. During the three-week competition, miners are competing to provide 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 achieve during the competition and on the network. Once the competition begins, you will be able to track your progress at spacerace.filecoin.io .

In addition to the onboarding storage capacity, the top 20 largest block reward winners will also receive an additional 100K FIL bonus proportional to how many block rewards they received. Once the network is live, you will be able to track the ranking of this award at reward.testnet.fildev.network .

Now you can

https://calibration.spacerace.filecoin.io

See the “calibrated” versions of both competition dashboards at https://reward.calibration.fildev.network/ .

Filecoin aims to create a decentralized, efficient, and powerful foundation for human 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 storage and retrieval transaction requests from competing robots and maintain a success rate of 80% or more . Robots will begin to trade with miners who successfully block sectors within 12-24 hours of the start of the competition and will continue to make transaction requests throughout the competition.

To prove that they can execute the entire sector lifecycle (onboarding, upgrading, and terminating a sector), participants must perform at least one committed capacity sector upgrade during the competition to receive rewards. See the Filecoin documentation for instructions.

Miners will be able to track transaction success rates and sector lifecycle status in the spacerace.filecoin.io dashboard. For additional details on the rules and eligibility requirements, please refer to the Space Race documentation and FAQ. Once the competition begins, please join the #space-race channel on Filecoin Slack for the latest competition updates, and join #fil-testnet for network/debugging issues!

Since late July, we have been operating a Space Race “calibration” network for miners to practice under real competition conditions and observe how their performance affects hypothetical competition results. This calibration period is a critical supplement to ensure that miners participating in the Space Race can meet the qualification criteria by successfully performing storage and retrieval transactions, and that the network is stable enough to succeed.

The calibration period also saw huge improvements in network functionality and performance. New features introduced in the calibration devnet include the ability to upgrade committed space through real transactions, store multiple transactions in a sector, request fast retrieval from miners via plain text copies, and exchange FIL for successful transactions through payment channels. Similar to EIP1559, the calibration network also introduces burning gas for on-chain resources consumed by message execution, and enables message senders to pay priority fees directly to block production miners without being bound by gas usage.

A big thank you to the community in the #fil-net-calibration channel on the Filecoin Slack for all their help with network upgrades over the past few weeks! Please make sure you use the latest calibrated network to ensure you’re ready to start Space Race on Monday with the latest fixes.

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 onboarding 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 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.

In addition, for miners who can seal data at high speed, we have a faucet robot that sends the reimbursement information of the initial pledge to the miner address in real time - enabling fast miners to continue to seal quickly. (Please 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, please refer to the Filecoin documentation to ensure that 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.

Please join us on Wednesday, August 26 at 10 PM UTC (3 PM PST | 6 AM IST) for the Space Race Opening Ceremony. We will celebrate the start of the Space Race and introduce the teams.

The Space Race will also offer a range of activities for participants:

· Weekly workshops every Tuesday at 9am (PST) | Wednesday at 9am (CST) | 1am (UTC)

o August 25: Filecoin Mining Workshop #1 - How to Solve Common Problems

o 9/01: Filecoin Mining Workshop #2 - Improvements and New Features

o September 08: Filecoin Mining Workshop #3 - Preparing for Mainnet

The Filecoin team is conducting a live AMA on Wednesday at 6pm (PST) | Thursday at 9am (CST) | 1am (UTC)

Miners Show and Tell every Thursday at 6pm (PST) | Thursday at 9am (CST) | 1am (UTC)

Friday , 5pm (PST) Space Race Report | Saturday, 8am (CST) | 12am (UTC)

Other special deep dive courses will be arranged throughout the competition, such as Filecoin’s CryptoEconomics, Mining Cluster Configuration, etc.

All events will be recorded and available online . If you would like to attend the Miner Show and Tell, please join the #space-race channel in Filecoin Slack and we will share a registration link next week.

We're so excited to see what the Space Race means for all of us - and so proud of the great progress we've made together over the past few weeks. It's been a pleasure to build this network with you!