Filecoin To Launch Mainnet Next Month

Filecoin, on Sunday, announced that Mainnet Ignition phase is set to be launched next month. Launching a blockchain is an involved and lengthy process, Filecoin said in the media release.

Like many other networks (including Polkadot, NEAR, and others), Filecoin is taking a phased approach to launching mainnet, with different groups and communities onboarding onto the network over a period of time, leading up to Mainnet Liftoff.

Over the next few weeks, various groups within the Filecoin community – including miners, clients, custodians, applications, network services, and more – will be onboarding onto the network in advance of Mainnet Liftoff. This pre-liftoff phase, which we’re calling Mainnet Ignition, gives network participants time to initialize, learn, set up their systems, and optimize their deployments. We’re all counting down to Liftoff, but that doesn’t mean the work is done. We still have a lot of preparation to do to set the network up for an amazing launch:

• Storage Miners – continue adding storage to the ignition network, preparing operations for mainnet, and stress-testing storage & retrieval deals.
• Clients & applications – participate in Slingshot, our ongoing Space Race competition to utilize Filecoin’s decentralized storage capacity to power useful, resilient data storage.
• Custodians & ecosystem partners – use this time to tune operations and onboard stakeholders onto the network.
• SAFT Holders – look out for emails from CoinList and your chosen custodian on how to get set up on the network during the Mainnet Ignition phase ahead of Mainnet Liftoff. Contact team@coinlist.co or investor-support@protocol.ai if you run into any issues.
• Implementation Developers – increase testing, hardening, and interoperability across Filecoin implementations including lotus [PL], forest [ChainSafe], fuhon [Soramitsu], and go-filecoin [IPFSForce].

Mainnet Ignition is also a time to solidify the many pathways for the Filecoin community to engage in network improvement and decision making. 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 is fully functional, but we expect the community to continue improving and evolving the Filecoin network with frequent software updates well beyond Mainnet Liftoff.