On June 25, 2020, the F ilecoin official blog updated the project roadmap, covering the progress made since the last roadmap update, and introduced the next steps before the launch of the Filecoin mainnet as it is about to enter the critical stage of the mainnet. In the past two months, the Filecoin project has made significant progress and a lot has happened in the ecosystem. Thank you for participating in testnets, developing applications, etc. Thank you for your contributions. Filecoin officially launched the Filecoin Phase II testnet on May 14. The Phase II testnet is the result of the community-recommended "Option 2". This important milestone includes two interoperable Filecoin implementations (go-filecoin and lotus), the implementation of WinningPoSt and WindowPoSt (Filecoin's two proofs-) and Drand. As a consensus network, the Filecoin Phase II testnet also includes major improvements to our participants and storage markets, as well as the improvement of the crypto-economic structure. Filecoin's second-phase test network has a total network computing power of 9PB The Filecoin Phase 2 testnet has reached 9PB of total network computing power and 9PB of verified data in about 1 month, almost 2 times our previous record. Last week, we reset the testnet to take advantage of the latest Lotus and Proofs optimizations. Since then, we have seen that the network has stored more than 6PB of data and is growing at a rate of 15 GB/second ( 1.2 PB /day). Testnet Incentive Program The second phase of Filecoin testing is the incentivized testnet. Earlier this month, we announced the rules and hardware proposals for Incentivized Testnet, our three-week collaborative competition to stress-test the network, encourage participants from all over the world, and provide miners with the opportunity to test drive before Filecoin. Miners will need to successfully complete real storage and retrieval transactions and execute the entire sector lifecycle - creating committed capacity sectors, upgrading them to store real data, and terminating them - in order to receive rewards. Filecoin Implementation Points Performance and reliability improvements Improvements to Filecoin Phase 2 Testnet Performance and Reliability. Since the start of the Phase 2 testnet , the main focus of our work has been on strengthening and improving the efficiency of our core implementation subsystems. We fixed the sealing-related issues that were reported shortly after launching the Filecoin Phase 2 testnet, and we also improved sync times by batching PoRep validations so that they can be executed in parallel. Now, if sync is interrupted before reaching the target height, it will start from where it was interrupted instead of restarting from genesis. Hardware specifications and PoRep for mainnet launch. Filecoin will use the SDR Proof of Replication algorithm in our testnet bounty competition and mainnet launch. Note: Miners should expect Filecoin to regularly upgrade its proofs after launch. While the Filecoin team does not recommend any specific hardware configuration, we do share some configurations that we use for various types of testing. However, there are likely to be more efficient configurations in the vast majority of cases, so we strongly encourage miners to test and experiment to find the best combination. Filecoin’s cryptoeconomic structure We have made significant progress in defining and solidifying Filecoin's cryptoeconomic structure to ensure that the network can meet the long-term needs of its customers and provide a solid foundation for the launch of the Filecoin mainnet. While we are still conducting extensive modeling and testing to finalize the parameters, this overview describes how Filecoin's cryptoeconomic structure will create a blockchain that powers useful work, reliable cloud storage services, and a thriving decentralized economy. For petabyte-scale datasets and larger, the most sensible solution often involves transferring data on hard drives. Filecoin’s offline data transfer feature allows users with very large datasets to complete the data transfer step offline (e.g., by shipping hard drives from the client to storage miners), and have storage and retrieval transactions occur on-chain as expected. Demonstrated improved efficiency and memory utilization We’ve made changes to how we seal data that significantly improve memory usage and sealing performance. For example, Neptun now allows us to build merkle trees on GPUs. These performance improvements continue to make Filecoin more efficient and accessible to a broad range of miners. Phase 2 of our Trusted Setup ceremony has already begun with the first batch of circuits, with more participants joining in the coming weeks. In preparation, we have significantly reduced the memory required for the "large circuit", which will allow for much smaller hardware for participants in the Phase 2 Trusted Setup ceremony. The purpose of Filecoin Discover is to help Filecoin become the repository of humanity’s most important datasets and make it accessible to others. Datasets include: ENCODE, 1000 Genomes, Project Gutenberg, Berkeley’s self-driving data, etc. Since May 7, Filecoin miners have signed up to store tens of petabytes of important data. With many hackathons coming up, Textile Powergate and Buckets are a great way to start building on Filecoin. Last week’s tutorial covered how to create buckets and archive data in the Filecoin network using Powergate under the hood. If you want to build an application on top of Powergate, you can also follow the JS client tutorial to learn more. The Textile Hub is a collection of hosted IPFS, Filecoin, and ThreadsDB nodes that makes it easy for developers to onboard Textile, and will also be adding support for Filecoin in the coming weeks. Learn more about these great tools for developers in the Textile Recap at the IPFS Pinning Summit. On June 23, members of the Filecoin community held the second Storage Developers "Show & Tell" call, where groups building in the Filecoin ecosystem came together, demoed their projects, and began cross-pollinating. Showcase teams included Fleek, Starling, and Textile. It's always great to see these groups building to make Filecoin easier to use! Filecoin Community Virtual Meeting On Tuesday, June 16th, the Filecoin team hosted our first-ever Filecoin Community Virtual Meetup! Our community meetups are a chance to meet the people behind the many tools and projects being built in the Filecoin ecosystem. Hope to see you at our next virtual meetup on July 14th! Filecoin Miner Community Phone We hosted our second Filecoin Miner Community Call at the end of May - a big thank you to everyone who asked questions! The call included updates on our growing miner ecosystem, verified clients, Filecoin Discover, and the testnet incentive program. Join us for the next Miner Community Call in Q3. Token custodians Gemini, Coinbase, and Anchorage all announced support for custody of Filecoin tokens at mainnet launch. Anchorage will also support contracts to unlock Filecoin at launch. If you plan to hold Filecoin, check out these custodian options for more information. Filecoin DevGrants Wave 3 We received a huge response from community members to the Wave 3 RFP, including 44 proposals, and we are in the process of notifying grant recipients, with the full list coming soon. Winning proposals from Wave 3 include the MetaMask SNAP plugin for Filecoin, user research with professional archivists at museums and similar organizations, the Data CID Status Checker and Storage Oracle, Filecoin Cloud Images, a proxy re-encryption service to support data forwarding use cases, and a multi-chain API among many other projects. Filecoin Community Highlights
The Filecoin Blog has been featuring Filecoin use cases and developers in the community who are building essential tools and services on the Filecoin network. We hope these stories inspire others to join our mission to build world-class tools for the distributed web. Our latest highlights are the Small Data Industry and Open Work Labs. More coming soon! Following the launch of the Phase 2 testnet, we held an online Q&A session with Juan Benet, founder of the Filecoin project. During this 1-hour session, we fielded hundreds of questions from over 1,400 community members around the world. Questions ranged from roadmap and timeline updates to details about validated clients, hardware requirements, and the latest on testnet incentives! You can learn more about the event in our recap here. Our next Q&A session is Thursday, June 25th, so join the #fil-ama channel on Slack to learn more. We are continuing to rapidly progress towards our mainnet roadmap, and below is our public project roadmap. We would like to highlight some upcoming milestones. Go-Filecoin implementation is community maintained As we’ve explained in the past, multiple independent implementations of the Filecoin protocol are critical to the long-term security and resiliency of the Filecoin network. Over the past few months, each of the four Filecoin implementations has made significant progress: In April, we launched our first interoperable network, lotus and go-filecoin interoperable nodes, and shortly thereafter we launched the second phase of the testnet, which included interoperable implementations and updated proof-of-spacetime. Soramitsu's Filecoin C++ implementation Fuhon has been working hard to add full interoperability. The team has made good progress and will join the testnet in the coming weeks Rust Filecoin, implemented by ChainSafe, has recently been updated with proofs and market participants, and is actively working on chain sync and data propagation, including a Rust implementation of the IPFS data sync algorithm Bitswap.
Now, as we near mainnet launch, we are excited to move the go-filecoin implementation to community maintenance, with different teams managing and improving all 4 implementations of Filecoin, allowing each team to focus and remain independent to meet our long-term decentralization and security goals for the broader Filecoin network. To that end, we are offering a Wave 4 DevGrant RFP for teams interested in maintaining go-filecoin. go-filecoin is almost feature-complete; crossing the finish line of mainnet launch may create some future opportunities for teams maintaining the project. For example, if highly optimized to be a good product for miners, go-filecoin could become the implementation of choice for a large portion of the Filecoin community. Additionally, building deep expertise in understanding and building Filecoin nodes could unlock other businesses, such as hosting nodes as a service and/or building second-layer products and solutions for the greater Filecoin ecosystem. Please get in touch via GitHub if you’re interested! Each of the four implementations is getting closer to feature completion when the Filecoin mainnet launches. Here is a snapshot of the progress of the main parts of the Filecoin protocol: ✅: Fully functional implementation | ?: Reuse components from another implementation | ?: Partial implementation To help support the rapidly growing Filecoin ecosystem, we are excited to launch Filecoin Ignite to bring the community together for a series of hackathons and learning events. We currently have 6 major events, including: Space Race, a global competition for Filecoin Miners; HackFS, a 30-day virtual hackathon that started on July 6th in partnership with the ETHGlobal team. We also have the Spark University Hackathon, an 8-week online competition that brings together developers from universities around the world to build on Filecoin. Reach out and let us know if you’d like to host an Ignite event! With over 4 million FIL and $250,000 in prizes to be distributed across events, now is a great time to get started building on Filecoin. The second phase of our “Trust Setup Ceremony” — where participants from around the world contribute their resources to help generate the security parameters of the Filecoin network, and public proofs for anyone to verify — has begun on the first set of circuits. More participants will join in the coming weeks, and community participation will begin on June 29th. The three-week testnet rewards program may start on July 20 ; miners will need to successfully complete real storage and retrieval transactions and execute the entire industry life cycle to be eligible for global and regional resource pool rewards totaling 4 million FIL. We have reached the final stage Filecoin is getting closer and closer to mainnet launch criteria, and the project as a whole continues to develop. Currently, our roadmap sets the launch near the end of the mainnet launch window. As before, we will update the public project roadmap Gantt chart with the latest estimates of upcoming milestones. These dates are still best-effort optimistic estimates based on the latest information requested by the community. They are not commitments, conservative estimates, or guarantees of any kind. If a security vulnerability or other major issue arises, we will ensure that the necessary time is taken and the issue is fully resolved before launching the mainnet. We sincerely hope that this is not necessary, but it is a necessary part of our commitment to launch a secure blockchain network. We are often reminded that building a blockchain is like building a software rocket, it is fundamentally hard and we must be extremely careful to ensure that what we release is secure and reliable. We are doing our best to do so responsibly. Every day, the opportunities to participate in the ecosystem only grow, so we hope you will join our discussions or join the community on Slack, as always, we are excited to build the distributed future with you. For more information about IPFS and Filecoin, as well as friends who want to participate in Filecoin mining, you can contact Kuangge (WeChat ID: kuangge2018) . |
