As announced in our last roadmap update, we’re using a public Gantt chart to maintain an updated view of our roadmap to launch. We are currently in Testnet Phase 1, and are gearing up to launch Testnet Phase 2. In this blog post, we talk about rough timing and upcoming milestones.

GHOSTy protocols enable miners to refer back to all observed blocks from the past in order to lend their chain weight. Filecoin’s consensus mechanism is built on a variation of this called tipsets. If Bitcoin operates like a race to produce the longest and most valid chain, Filecoin’s Expected Consensus is election-based and multiple miners can be elected as leaders in a given round. This in turn means multiple valid sibling blocks can be created per round. With each epoch, a new generation of a family tree can grow, called a tipset, a system unique to our network.

In this post, we share what’s next on our roadmap and a tool you can use to follow milestone timing estimates.

Today marks an important milestone for the Filecoin project: the launch of the Filecoin testnet (on schedule!). After significant research, design, and development, the Filecoin protocol is ready for live network testing. We’re thrilled to share it with you.

Becoming a Filecoin miner is an opportunity for community members to help store and preserve access to humanity’s most important information. By providing network security and infrastructure, Filecoin miners help build a more open, resilient, and trustworthy internet.

We are thrilled to have received many Dev Grant proposals from community members in Wave 1 reflecting a wide range of project ideas using Filecoin. We appreciate all proposals and hope to see more applications from enthusiastic developer teams in the future. We received 22 outstanding proposals, from which we selected 5 teams to work on the following projects…

As you may have seen in our recent update, the Filecoin team is gearing up to launch our testnet in December 2019 and mainnet in March 2020. Prior to launch, we need to conduct a secure trusted setup ceremony (read more about this below). We are seeking volunteers to participate in our trusted setup ceremony and to help us get Filecoin securely off the ground.

One of our most important goals is to make the Filecoin mainnet as secure and resilient as possible. One part of our network security strategy is launching the Filecoin network with multiple implementations. Today, we are delighted to announce lotus, our first alternate Filecoin implementation.

Yesterday, we launched the go-filecoin alphanet, go-filecoin release 0.5.6 (right on schedule – well actually, a day early!). As we announced in our 2019 Q2 & Q3 Update, this was our last major interim milestone before our upcoming testnet launch in December 2019.

The most important news in this update is that we’re getting very close to launching the network. We are delayed from our prior estimates, but – as you will read below – we have made tremendous progress on all fronts! We are close enough that we can decide on the following launch windows: Alphanet: Sep 25, 2019; Testnet: Dec 11, 2019; Mainnet: March 2020.