Looking back on the historical process Filecoin has gone through in 2020
Now the time has come to 2021. In the past 2020, Filecoin has made amazing progress and has made no small achievements. Although the mainnet was launched on October 15th, anyone who has been following the Filecoin community for a long time knows that Filecoin's launch path is full of bright spots. Next, let us review the most exciting time and announcements of last year.
Filecoin discovery
Filecoin Discover was launched during Filecoin's testnet era, aiming to incentivize Filecoin miners to store valuable data and earn additional FIL in the process. The basis of the Discover program is to compensate Filecoin miners to select data from the Filecoin Discover Store (a library of valuable data covering literature, science, art, and history). Miners who wish to join the Filecoin network can visit the site, select the data set they want to store, and receive it on the drive at cost. The many experiences gained from the development and community participation phases of Filecoin Discover helped shape the Filecoin Plus program.
Filecoin Discover continues to advance Filecoin's mission, which is to create a decentralized, efficient and powerful foundation for human information.
The second phase of the testnet started
By the end of 2019, we launched the first phase of the Filecoin testnet. In May, we launched the second phase. Testnet 2 is the last major milestone before the launch of the mainnet. In this update, we released two interoperable Filecoin implementations, security proofs (WinningPoSt and WindowPoSt), Drand's overview of the cryptoeconomic structure of the network, a new document site before launch, and a new security audit.
Filecoin ignite announcement
By June, we have moved towards the mainnet launch at full speed. We announced Filecoin Ignite, a timetable for a series of events that will bring together builders, miners, researchers, enthusiasts and other network participants before (and after) the launch event. Ignite events include HackFS, Spark University Hackathon, Space Race 1 and 2, and the newly announced Filecoin Frontier Accelerator.
Hacker file
August marks the completion of our first HackFS hackathon. In more than a month, there were 134 teams working on projects in the entire Filecoin ecosystem. A total of more than 470 hackers from 50 countries in 19 time zones participated in the 30-day virtual event. Check out the full introduction of the top 10 finalists: Sailplane, Public Annotation Network (PAN) Protocol, Pnlp, BlockSig, Valist, IPFS Recovery, PlanetFlare, Web3API, Decentralized Docker Hub and Pygate.
Space Race 1
Space Race 1 is a three-week competition designed to incentivize miners to add storage to the network and achieve transaction quality goals. In the competition, the miners competed for the 4M FIL prize. At the end of the game, 230PiB of storage space was added to the network-more than twice the original goal. 400 miners from six continents participated in the event and carried out eight network upgrades based on the lessons learned, including dozens of bugs and performance fixes. The community also held a series of technical lectures, seminars and in-depth explorations, which can be found on the Filecoin Youtube channel.
Filecoin Economic Report
In August, we released the Filecoin Economic Report. This 34-page overview describes how the Filecoin protocol adjusts rewards and actually rewards useful and reliable storage. The economic design of the Filecoin network is designed to adjust rewards and actually reward useful and reliable storage. Store as few rules as possible. Many of the mechanisms and stimuli of the agreement are carefully designed, and there is only one goal: if the participants in the network economy pursue their own interests, the network should develop and grow.
Space Race 2
Space Race 1 was so successful, we knew we had to do it again. In September, we launched Space Race 2 to continue adding storage to the network and introduced a new Slingshot track for Filecoin customers, application developers, and tool developers to deploy their products to the testnet. As a result, application developers have stored more than 650 TiB of data in 520,000 transactions. These transactions were concluded by more than 100 projects in 19 countries/regions. Thanks to their efforts, these players won 59,850 FIL in the total prize pool of the first stage of the Slingshot competition.
Slate launch
Slate is a completely open source file sharing network built by Protocol Labs for Filecoin for research and collaboration. Slate allows users to store data, organize data and share it securely with the world. The launch of Slate brought more than 600 new accounts and became the fifth-ranked product on ProductHunt. So far, Slate has close to 200GB of 23486 unique user data storage, which is all user storage for 0 downtime.
Filecoin mainnet launch
The date we are all waiting for... At 3pm UTC on October 15, 2020, the Filecoin network is live. This moment marks the culmination of years of innovation and hard work in the Filecoin community. Thank you so much to everyone who dedicated their time, ideas and expertise to make Filecoin a reality.
Liftoff week
Without proper celebration, we cannot let the Filecoin mainnet go live. From October 19th to 23rd, the community held the Filecoin Liftoff event, which is fully dedicated to the Filecoin ecosystem; it lasts for a week. Speakers from all over the world and the entire Web3 ecosystem discussed their project and the Filecoin network with us. In the past 5 days, more than 2,000 participants have watched more than 82,000 sessions on YouTube. Filecoin Liftoff is led by 84 representatives and 81 speakers, representing all participants in the Filecoin community-application developers, miners, storage customers, policy makers, human rights activists, investors and more!
The event covered more than 280 articles, including CoinDesk, Decrypt, Fortune, Morning Consult, The Block and Investing.com.
Filecoin has more than 1EB storage
Less than four weeks after the mainnet launch, the Filecoin community celebrated its first major milestone in November. As of November 24, the distributed storage capacity of the network has exceeded 1 exbibyte (EiB). How much is an exbibyte? 1 EiB is enough to store: 290 million 1080p movies, 4,500 Wikipedia, 685,000 consecutive video calls or 19 copies of the entire Internet archive.
The Filecoin community and ETH Global held a one-day packaged storage market summit together. The day was divided into five themed "blocks". Developers, investors, and partners from the Filecoin ecosystem conducted an in-depth discussion and overview of different aspects of the Filecoin network and its economy.
If 2020 teaches us anything, it is the extraordinary ability of the Filecoin community to innovate. Most of the achievements of the community in 2020 are done through the Filecoin testnet. Now, as we look forward to 2021 and beyond on the Filecoin mainnet, we will never be excited again.
Congratulations to the entire Filecoin community for a brilliant 2020! We can’t wait to see the amazing things we can build together in 2021.