Filecoin Development Team: The launch time of the testnet reward program has been determined!

Professionalism and focus, win-win cooperation

As we enter the homepage of the Filecoin mainnet release, Lotus (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 feature for verified and quickly retrieved transactions, upgraded the Committed Capacity sector, and provided major improvements for Filecoin participants. The mining community is also accelerating fast, with petabytes of storage from all over the world joining the Filecoin Testnet - which reached a new milestone of 20PB onboarded storage this week.

Our next major milestone on the road to mainnet launch is the launch of the Filecoin Testnet Incentive Program — nicknamed the Filecoin Space Race. This collaborative competition is designed to stress-test the network, encourage participation from participants 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, Space Race’s Filecoin tokens are also intended to help miners quickly onboard their storage capacity on the Filecoin mainnet, and additional optimization work is underway to make this process smoother.

New Rewards

In addition to launching storage capacity - a vital part of validating the Filecoin network’s goal to create a decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity’s 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.

Filecoin Bug Bounty Program

Running a testnet incentive program is a critical step before mainnet launch in order to identify and fix any bugs or critical security issues before mainnet launches. 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 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.

We will also announce additional goals and bounties on the bug bounty website prior to the Space Race.

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 competition participants 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 begin the official 3-week competition the week of August 3rd.

During the 2-week calibration period, miners are strongly encouraged to shift their primary attention and focus on the Space Race devnet in order to discover and debug any issues with the setup before the race begins.

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

Opening and Closing Ceremonies

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

· 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, and more

AMA with Filecoin community participants

· Opportunity for participating teams to present their setups

· And more!

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 Space Race and Filecoin’s Mainnet launch.

This is a critical window for key bug fixing, run setup time, and final parameter optimization following the testnet incentive program.

Therefore, we are updating the mainnet launch window to August 31st - 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 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 this is not necessary, but it is a necessary component of our commitment to launching a secure blockchain network.