After years of research and development, Filecoin’s mainnet launch is within sight. Today, we’re announcing Filecoin’s testnet incentives program and inviting miners all over the world to compete to earn global and regional pools totaling up to 4 million Filecoin tokens.
Program structure
The testnet incentives program is a collaborative competition 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. The competition’s basic structure is simple: for three weeks, miners will compete to onboard as much storage capacity as possible to the network. The top 100 miners globally, as well as the top 50 miners from each continent, will earn Filecoin rewards based on how much storage they and the network achieve during the test period.
There are two ways miners can earn more rewards:
- The total size of the reward pool increases alongside total network storage capacity.
- The total pool of rewards is split between eligible mining operations pro rata, based on how much storage they add as a percentage of total network storage.
“Regions” are the six continents, excluding Antarctica. We use this list to decide which continent a country falls into. The total reward pools split between the top mining operations are:
| Total FIL rewards (global pool) | Global network storage achieved |
|---|---|
| 100k | 5 PiB |
| 200k | 10 PiB |
| 300k | 25 PiB |
| 500k | 50 PiB |
| 1MM * | 100 PiB |
* Only unlocked if each region achieves at least 1PiB of storage
| Total FIL rewards (regional pool) | Regional network storage achieved |
|---|---|
| 25k | 100 TiB |
| 50k | 500 TiB |
| 100k | 1 PiB |
| 250k | 5 PiB |
| 500k | 10 PiB |
Here’s a sample calculation:
- During the competition, a mining operation located in Argentina seals 1.5 PiB of storage to the network.
- The South America region has 5.0 PiB of total storage, so the regional leaders will split 250,000 FIL. 3.0 PiB are held by the top 50 mining operations in the region, with the remainder held by smaller miners.
- The global leaderboard has 120 PiB of total storage, with 100 PiB held by the top 100 mining operations and 20 PiB held by smaller miners. Each region has also reached 1 PiB of total storage, so the largest global reward tier (1MM FIL) is unlocked.
- 1.5 PiB is enough for a top-100 place on the global leaderboard.
- The mining operation would be eligible to receive 125,000 FIL from the regional leaderboard (250k total FIL rewards * 1.5 PiB / 3.0 PiB) and 15,000 FIL from the global leaderboard (1MM total FIL rewards * 1.5 PiB / 100 PiB), for a total of 140,000 FIL.
In addition to committing sealed storage, miners must be prepared to successfully complete terabytes of real storage and retrieval deals to be eligible for rewards. They also must demonstrate the ability to execute the full sector life cycle – creating committed capacity sectors, upgrading them to store real data, and terminating them.
The competition will include a dashboard where miners can view global and regional reward tiers, as well as individual miner storage power, deal success rate, and sector life cycle command completion, in real time. Miners will also be able to display their names (individual or company) alongside their miner ID on the leaderboard.
Rules
- Any rewards earned will be encoded into the genesis block and will vest linearly over six months from mainnet launch.
- To be eligible for rewards, miners must “claim” their miner ID from the dashboard following the provided instructions before the competition ends and pass an AML/KYC check.
- The metric used to calculate storage is raw byte-power. Sector quality & verified deals are not considered for purposes of calculating rewards.
- A miner’s “location,” for regional leaderboards, is the physical location of the mining operation. Operations split between multiple regions must run multiple miners. Miners from regions other than the most competitive region will be required to submit documentation verifying their location claims. Claiming to be from a different location will disqualify you from rewards and leaderboard inclusion.
- If a bug is identified during the competition that threatens the validity of the power table, or the Filecoin team identifies some other unforeseen exceptional circumstance, the Filecoin team may end the competition early. Rewards will still be awarded for the period prior to the discovery of any such bug, to the extent they can be reliably determined. If the bug is responsibly disclosed to the Filecoin team, the team reporting it will be eligible for rewards of up to 250,000 FIL, depending on the severity and practicality of the bug, as determined by the Filecoin team.
- While we don’t expect it, in the unlikely event that Protocol Labs or the Filecoin Foundation determine in their sole discretion that legal or regulatory issues prevent the delivery of any portion of rewards, the rewards may be restructured, postponed, or cancelled.
Hardware
Filecoin will use the SDR proof-of-replication (very similar to the existing testnet construction) for testnet incentives and at mainnet launch. Miners should expect Filecoin to regularly upgrade its proofs after launch.
The Filecoin team does not recommend any specific hardware configuration. For the sake of convenience, here are some setups we’ve used for various types of testing. It is overwhelmingly likely that there are more efficient setups, and we strongly encourage miners to test and experiment to find the best combinations.
Timing
The competition will run for a total of three weeks. We’ll confirm the exact start date when we fix a launch date, but the competition may begin as soon as early July. We strongly encourage miners to start preparing now.
Join the testnet and start mining
Whether you’re an experienced miner or just getting started, the testnet incentives competition is a great time to ramp up your participation on the Filecoin network. Get started with the docs for Lotus (a Filecoin node and miner) and join the Filecoin Slack.