In-depth Analysis | Filecoin mainnet launch postponed to September, what’s new in the meantime?

On July 14, Filecoin officially announced that the mainnet launch window period was delayed to August 31-September 21 .

The specific official website content is selected as follows:

Be fully prepared for the competition

As we head into the front page of the Filecoin mainnet launch, Lotus (the Filecoin reference implementation) is making rapid progress.

In the past two weeks alone, the team has implemented major data transfer improvements for the Filecoin market, completed the final sector lifecycle functionality for verified and quickly retrieved transactions, and upgraded Committed Capacity , providing major improvements for Filecoin participants.

The mining community is also accelerating fast, with miners all over the world onboarding PB-level storage to the Filecoin Testnet which reached a new milestone of 20PBonboarded storage .

On the road to mainnet launch, our next major milestone is the launch of the Filecoin Testnet Incentive Program, the Filecoin Space Race . This collaborative competition is 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 3-week competition, miners will compete to acquire as much storage capacity as possible on 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 that Filecoin and the network acquire during the competition.

In addition to rewarding competition winners, the Filecoin for Space Race aims to help miners quickly onboard their storage capacity on the Filecoin mainnet, and other optimization work is underway to make this process smoother .

New Block Reward Incentive

In addition to launching storage capacity - a vital part of validating the Filecoin network, which aims to create a decentralized, efficient, and stable foundation for human information, the goal is to test actual block mining in the Filecoin blockchain . Once the main network is launched, this will become one of the main ways miners earn rewards for operating the network.

Therefore, to ensure that the testnet incentive competition closely mimics the dynamics of the mainnet, we are pleased to announce an additional reward of 100K FIL to be distributed proportionally to the 20 largest block reward winners . The additional reward pool will follow the same rules and requirements as the storage competition and have its own leaderboard.

Please join Filecoin’s space-race channel to get the latest updates!

Filecoin Bug Bounty Program

Running a testnet incentive program is a critical step before the mainnet launch so that any bugs or critical security issues can be identified and fixed before the mainnet launch.

Therefore, we strongly encourage Space Race participants to use this testnet to evaluate and report any potential attacks , issues, or bugs they may find in the Filecoin protocol or the reference implementation. Please stress test the network, try to break things, and report any issues you encounter!

To address this, we will be rewarding participants through the new Filecoin Bug Bounty Program to earn Filecoin by helping to improve the network.

If you're interested in finding and squashing bugs, and getting rewarded for doing so, check it out! We'll also be announcing additional goals and bounties on the bug bounty site prior to the Space Race competition.

New Rewards Calibration Period

We have been planning to release our testnet rewards program on July 20th, but have heard strong requests from the community to create a window for contestants to try out mining setups with the latest features and real competition conditions (including leaderboards, storage and retrieval transaction evaluation systems, and updated economic parameters). Many improvements have been made over the past few weeks, and miners and developers alike want to ensure they are well tested before competing.

Therefore, we have added a 2-week calibration period before the 3-week competition. During the 2-week calibration period (July 20th - August 2nd) , miners will be able to practice under real competition conditions and see how their performance affects hypothetical competition results.

This will be done on a new devnet with all the latest features and optimizations. We will reset the Filecoin Testnet and start the official 3-week competition the week of August 3rd .

During the 2-week calibration period, miners are strongly encouraged to shift their focus and focus on the Space Race devnet to find and debug any issues with the setup before the race begins. Please join the Filecoin space-race channel where we will share instructions on how to get started next week!

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

1. Opening and Closing Ceremonies

2. AMA with competition organizers to answer questions about network incentives, program structure, and eligibility rules

3. Workshops designed to help miners better understand the latest updates on Filecoin’s crypto-economic parameters, new features that have landed on Lotus in recent weeks, how to effectively configure large-scale mining setups to take full advantage of competition, etc.

4. AMA with Filecoin community participants

5. Opportunities for participating teams to present their setups

Roadmap Update

While we’re happy to give the mining community (and development teams) more time to make the most of this race, we can’t shorten the time between the Space Race and Filecoin’s Mainnet launch.

This is a critical window for key bug fixes, run setup time, and final parameter optimization following the testnet incentive program. Therefore, we have updated the mainnet launch window to August 31st to September 21st to reflect this additional calibration period.

As always, we will update the public project roadmap Gantt chart to provide the latest estimates for upcoming milestones. Please keep in mind that these dates are still best-effort optimistic estimates based on the latest information, as requested by the community.

They are not promises, conservative estimates, or guarantees of any kind. If a security vulnerability or other major issue arises, we will ensure that we take the necessary time and fully resolve the issue before launching Mainnet . We sincerely hope that this is not necessary, but it is a necessary part of our commitment to launching a secure blockchain network.

We are excited to build the future with you.

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