Filecoin, a decentralized storage network, has now entered its penultimate phase of development. The Mainnet Ignition phase affords network participants — including miners, clients, custodians, applications, and network services – time to initialize, learn, set up their systems, and optimize their deployments, before Mainnet Liftoff.
Mainnet Ignition follows the success of Filecoin’s Space Race program, the multi-track incentivized testnet competition intended to stress-test the network, rewards the storage of real, valuable, and usable data, and help miners and developers get ready to run the world’s biggest decentralized storage network. Exceeding targets, Space Race was extended following developer demand and, currently underway in its second iteration, has seen over 400 miners onboarding more than 350PiB of data storage power – the equivalent of 90 million 1080p movies, or 1,400 full copies of Wikipedia. The ecosystem continues to grow and currently stands at over 280 projects collaborating on the network.
Mainnet Ignition is also a time to solidify the many pathways for the Filecoin community to engage in network improvement and decision making. Storage miners, community champions, developers, clients, and ecosystem partners can all participate in enhancing the network through the open Filecoin Improvement Process, upgrading it through cross-implementation discussions in the biweekly Core Devs meeting, and ratifying new changes via consensus among miners.
During Mainnet Ignition, network participants will undertake a number of activities specific to their roles, including, for example:
-
Storage Miners – continue adding storage to the ignition network, preparing operations for mainnet, and stress-testing storage & retrieval deals.
-
Clients & applications – participate in Slingshot, the ongoing Space Race competition to utilize Filecoin’s decentralized storage capacity to power useful, resilient data storage.
-
Custodians & ecosystem partners – use this time to tune operations and onboard stakeholders onto the network.
-
SAFT Holders – lookout for emails from CoinList and your chosen custodian on how to get set up on the network during the Mainnet Ignition phase ahead of Mainnet Liftoff.
-
Implementation Developers – increase testing, hardening, and interoperability across Filecoin implementations including lotus [PL], forest [ChainSafe], fuhon [Soramitsu], and go-filecoin [IPFSForce].
Liftoff will commence at block 148888 and Filecoin will host a week of events from October 19-23 to celebrate the launch.
