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Chinese miners’ dream of profiting from the launch and expected popularity of Filecoin may be about to come true as the supposed world’s largest decentralized storage network reports it has entered its penultimate development phase ahead of launch next month.
Filecoin confirms the mainnet launch for October 15 which, if goes as planned, could see the platform that aims to decentralize data stores to safeguard their preservation and eliminate the risk of a single point of failure take off after three years since its acclaimed initial coin offering when the blockchain-based storage provider raised $257 mln.
Originally, slated for launch in mid-2019, the project was pushed back due to final testings and a “calibration period” for miners. About a year before 2019’s delayed launch, Chinese firms have been marketing Filecoin cloud mining services particularly for its considered ease of mining without the need for specialised mining devices. Some reports say China is eyeing developing Filecoin mining hardware with data from blockchain explorers showing that top Filecoin storage miners are in China accounting for over 80% of the network’s testnet storage mining power at roughly 15 petabytes (15,000 terabytes).
Over $15 mln worth of Filecoin mining software and hardware were also said to have been stashed by mining pools in China waiting for investors and self-mining while large Bitcoin mining companies like RRMine reportedly sold $15 million in cloud computing contracts based on the expected roll out.
To date, the test network has seen over 400 miners onboarding more than 350PiB of data storage power – the equivalent of 90 million 1080p movies, or 1,400 full copies of Wikipedia. The ecosystem currently stands at over 280 projects collaborating on the network even as Filecoin commences the Mainnet Ignition phase for network participants — including miners, clients, custodians, applications, and network services – time to initialize, learn, set up their systems, and optimize their deployments, before Mainnet Liftoff which will commence at block 148888.
During Mainnet Ignition, which also serves as a time to solidify the many pathways for the Filecoin community to engage in network improvement and decision making, network participants will undertake activities specific to their roles. They include storage miners adding storage to the network, preparing for mainnet, and stress-testing storage and retrieval deals; and clients and applications participating in Slingshot, the ongoing Space Race competition (the multi-track incentivized testnet competition intended to stress-test the network, reward the storage of real, valuable, and usable data, and help miners and developers get ready to run Filecoin) to use Filecoin’s capacity for useful data storage. Another is the implementation developers increasing testing, hardening, and interoperability across Filecoin implementations including lotus [PL], forest [ChainSafe], fuhon [Soramitsu], and go-filecoin [IPFSForce].
In all, storage miners, community champions, developers, clients, and ecosystem partners can all participate in enhancing the network through the open Filecoin Improvement Process, upgrading it through cross-implementation discussions in the biweekly Core Devs meeting, and ratifying new changes via consensus among miners. Filecoin, which has also been deemed popular in China because of speculation on the price of Filecoin $FIL tokens which some exchanges have reportedly offered to be traded on an IOU basis, plans to host a week of events from October 19-23 to celebrate the launch.
The platform earlier this month revealed the details of its cryptoeconomic structure in a report titled Engineering Filecoin’s Economy ahead of the expected launch.
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