Welcome to the third installment of our Filecoin Community Highlights series, where we feature users and developers who are building essential tools and services on the Filecoin network. We hope these stories inspire others to join us in our mission to build world-class tools for the distributed web.

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

Welcome to the second installment of our Filecoin Community Highlights series, where we feature users and developers who are building essential tools and services on the Filecoin network. We hope these stories inspire others to join us in our mission to build world-class tools for the distributed web.

The Wave 3 deadline for Filecoin Dev Grants has been extended to April 15th at 23:59 PDT. This is the final wave with a few months to build something before Filecoin’s mainnet launch. A range of new RFP ideas have been published. We seek proposals to develop new tools, applications and proof-of-concepts that can showcase the potential of the protocol. We’d also like to announce new Wave 2 projects and some Wave 1 demos.

Welcome to the first blog post in our Filecoin Community Highlights series. Over the next few weeks, we will be 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 us in our mission to build world-class tools for the distributed web.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our March 5 Q&A about the Filecoin project! We answered more than 100 questions in our 1-hour session (fast and furious typing!). We fielded questions on topics ranging from hardware requirements for mining, to our timeline for Testnet Phase 2 and mainnet launch, to the inner workings of our proofs constructions. You can find an updated summary of the most frequent and relevant questions below.

This Thursday, March 5, 2020, we will host a virtual Q&A session with Juan Benet, founder of the Filecoin Project. For one hour, Juan will be online to answer any questions you might have about our testnet, updated roadmap and future plans. We hope you can join us!

In this blog post, we cover recent progress since launching Testnet Phase 1 and updated roadmap information about Testnet Phase 2 and mainnet launch. Please review our Roadmap Update Q4 2019 and Testnet Phase 2 Update (in that order) for additional context.

Filecoin is built on a variation of Proof-of-Space. In building a decentralized storage network, we set out to build a proof structure in which consensus is achieved through an operation yielding positive social externality: data storage. With the testnet launch, we’re unveiling a new set of storage-based proof systems to attain decentralized consensus.

Today, we are excited to announce two additional implementations of the Filecoin protocol: forest – being implemented in Rust by ChainSafe, and fuhon – being implemented in C++ by Soramitsu. These implementations are in active development, and are now fully open for anyone to use or contribute to. Check them out on GitHub!