Filecoin update roadmap: launch test network in December, main online line or postponed to Q1 next year

The distributed storage project Filecoin's development team today released the Q2 & Q3 update report. According to the latest roadmap, Filecoin's first public test network will be launched on December 11 this year, and its main network will be postponed until 2020. It will be online in the first quarter.

It is reported that in 2019, the Filecoin team not only opened the go-filecoin code base, but also launched the first devnet (developer network) in the first quarter.

As of September 2019, the Filecoin team has developed several projects and focused on improving protocol design, and after several months of research and engineering work, it is approaching a system that meets the security and scalability requirements of Filecoin. The agreement structure, the current development team is actively implementing this agreement.

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According to the new plan, the next task of the Filecoin development team is:

1. Alphanet will be launched on September 25, 2019 (a long-running Filecoin test network)
2. A public test network will be released on December 11, 2019;
3. The release date of the main network has not yet been determined. It is expected that 1-2 quarters after the release of the test network, the development team said that the exact release date will be announced in the first quarter of 2020;

Filecoin development update

To date, the Filecoin development team has released four major go-filecoin updates and six major rust-fil-proofs updates. It also launches and maintains the community devnet, and will soon launch an alpha network. The following are the main updates:

Storage Market Agreement Implementation : Miners are required to submit PoSt certifications on a regular basis to ensure they continue to properly store customer data. If the miners make a mistake (ie if they don't submit the required information on time), they will be punished. Error handling and penalties are really critical to the filecoin system. Currently, the development team has implemented troubleshooting and penalties for delayed or erroneous PoSt submissions, which is a major part of the storage market agreement.

Time and space proof integration : Filecoin has integrated the proof of time certificate (PoSt) into the code base of go-filecoin. Miners now regularly calculate proof of continuous storage and store these certificates on the blockchain. Once PoSt is finalized, integrating the final version of PoSt will be very simple.

Data Storage Migration : In addition to sealed client data, the filecoin node stores other data on disk, such as configuration, blockchain blocks, transaction status, and encryption keys. As development progresses, we need a way to safely change the type and mode of this data. In response, developers have designed and implemented file system repo migration so that nodes can be seamlessly updated while running in a production environment.

Faster blockchain synchronization : Fast blockchain synchronization is an important UX feature for Filecoin. If you don't optimize it, it can take a few days to retrieve a Filecoin blockchain that has only one month. In response, the Filecoin team has made significant progress in optimizing its goals, enabling faster link synchronization through Graphsync 's IPLD DAG traversal protocol.

More reliable messages : Filecoin implements features such as outbound message queues and message expiration, making message delivery and nonce generation more reliable.

Improvements to the message pool : Filecoin's message pool now implements validation rules, message restrictions, and performs nonce tracing to ensure messages are not replayed.

Architecture and modularity : The development team has made significant improvements in internal architecture, modularity, and testability, and more improvements will occur. Their goal is to make the code base as modular as possible for easier implementation. Component upgrades and community members to contribute better.

Filecoin Automation and System Toolkit (FAST) : This is a tool built by the development team for automated integration and system testing. With FAST, developers have developed a localnet that can quickly and easily build a local network.

Multi-sector size : A sector is a contiguous array of bytes that miners assemble from stored transaction data and seals in which the protocol performs space-time certificates. In other words, a sector is a unit of data, causing a miner to start earning Filecoin. In the past, sectors in the entire network could only have one size. Now, rust-fil-proofs supports many different sector sizes, allowing miners to have more flexibility in configuring their storage operations.

Workpiece Containment Proof (PIPs) : This proves that the piece of data specified in the store transaction is stored in a particular sector. PIP has been implemented in the first version of rust-fil-proofs and has been integrated into the go-filecoin codebase.

Reduce memory requirements : Miners must seal a sector before they can begin to prove that the data they store is correct. In order to defend against a type of attack that would reduce the security of the protocol, the sealing process must be computationally intensive. To meet these safety requirements, the seal previously consumed a large amount of memory. Recent optimizations have reduced the memory required for sealing by a factor of eight, and this optimization will greatly reduce the hardware costs of all miners.

Close to final hardware requirements : Filecoin's proof optimization is still in progress, but is nearing the final confirmation stage. Optimizations such as reduced memory requirements are good news for miners. The development team is currently confirming the final hardware requirements and will announce them as soon as possible. (Note: Please do not purchase any Filecoin mining products before sharing these hardware parameters)

Filecoin Research Update

In the past few months, the Filecoin development team's analysis of the expected consensus (EC) security led to significant improvements in structure and independent specifications. In the test network, the development team will adjust different network-related EC parameters.

According to the calculations of the development team, to achieve the end-of-line waiting for Bitcoin to wait for 6 blocks (about 1 hour) on Filecoin, the user only needs to wait 2 minutes.

Compared with the traditional PoS (Equity Proof) consensus agreement, EC improves security, especially against the nose-at-stake attack, and it also increases resistance to long-range attacks, and related papers will be released.

Optimization of copy proof: The Filecoin development team explored four types of optimizations for Filecoin's proof of replication (PoRep) and made some progress:

(1) Use GPU to improve SNARK certification time and efficiency;

(2) Reduce the size of the SNARK certificate by batch verification (ZEXE);

(3) Reduce replication time and memory consumption through many engineering optimizations;

(4) Reduce the proof size by constructing level optimization (eg, mixing merkle trees). According to the plan, the development team will complete the final copy proof construction in the next 1-2 months.

Time and space proof construction: The development team improved the PoSt construction and they are currently conducting a safety analysis to ensure that this new PoSt meets the system's security requirements.

Libp2p and IPFS updates

We know that Filecoin is built on top of libp2pp and IPFS and relies heavily on libp2p and IPFS components, both of which were developed by Protocol Labs. In 2019, libp2p and IPFS also ushered in a lot of progress.

For libp2p, the most important message at present may be that the Ethereum 2.0 network will use it as the network layer, and the adoption of the head blockchain project will make libp2p more stable and scalable, thus benefiting Filecoin.

IPFS has also ushered in a lot of updates. This year, its go-ipfs client ushered in 4 newer versions, js-ipfs updated 13 versions, ipfs-cluster updated 4 versions, and ipfs-companion updated 28 Version, ipfs-desktop has updated 7 versions.

Among them, go-ipfs achieves efficient processing of large files, as well as better connection management and memory allocation.

Precautions

Despite the many developments in Filecoin's development, the team is still reminding at the end that these time points are optimistic estimates, and there may be delays. In addition, it is recommended that investors should not dig according to any specifications in devnet. Mine hardware, as these specifications may change.

Note: For more updates, readers can view the FilecoinQ2 & Q3 update report .

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