The Filecoin Testnet Incentives Program is kicking off on Monday August 24th at 10pm UTC! For the next 3 weeks, miners on the Filecoin Testnet will be competing for up to 4M FIL in prizes as they race to onboard as much storage space as possible. In the past month, we’ve already seen over 240 miners from 5 continents preparing to participate - reaching sealing speeds of 1 TiB / second (15 PiB sealed within 3 days)!

In the path to mainnet launch, our next big milestone is the launch of the Filecoin Testnet Incentives Program - nicknamed the Filecoin Space Race. This collaborative competition is intended to stress-test the network, encourage participation all over the world, and help miners get ready to run the world’s biggest decentralized storage network.

It’s very exciting to see the growth of interest in the Filecoin Dev Grant program. For Wave 3 of Filecoin Dev Grants that were due in April, we received 44 proposals from the community. A list of Wave 4 RFPs have been published and are due July 1st at 23:59 PDT for priority consideration. We will evaluate later proposals as capacity allows.

Today we’re excited to announce ProtoSchool’s first-ever Filecoin tutorial, Verifying Storage on Filecoin. It offers a beginner-friendly, code-free look at Filecoin’s proof system, exploring how the protocol implements decentralized storage with a combination of consensus mechanisms and cryptographic proofs that that allow clients to trust that miners are storing their data as agreed.

Our June 2020 roadmap update covers progress made since the last roadmap update and a peek into what’s next for the Filecoin project as we enter the homestretch to the mainnet launch.

The Filecoin team hosted our very first Filecoin virtual community meetup! Thank you to all who attended and made it such a success. Our community meetups are an opportunity to meet the people behind the many tools and projects being built in the Filecoin ecosystem.

Filecoin is getting closer to mainnet launch, and the ecosystem is moving at blazing speed. Filecoin Miners are building out infrastructure at small, medium and large scales. The testnet just passed 9 PiB. Developers are making apps, dapps, dev tools, and more. There are thousands of people building around Filecoin, but so far they have been doing it mostly by themselves. It is time to get together and cross-pollinate.

In December, we shared the first set of guidelines for mining on Testnet Phase 1. The project has since matured significantly, and we continue to build on the lessons learned through testing. We’ve now progressed to Testnet Phase 2, and are excited to share the latest updates, opportunities, and guidelines for Filecoin storage miners.

Filecoin is excited to be a challenge partner in the Spark University Hackathon, an 8 week online competition bringing together developers from universities around the world, to learn, build, and launch new applications and storage solutions on the Filecoin network.

At the end of last year, we successfully completed the first phase of our trusted setup also known as the “powers of tau” ceremony. Since the end of the year, our team has been preparing for Phase 2 of our trusted setup. To learn more about Phase 2 and how you can help contribute, read on! If you haven’t signed up previously and would like to participate, please fill out this form!