The mainnet launch is imminent, are you ready?

As crazy as it sounds, Mainnet Liftoff is less than 24 hours away! As we count the final hours of Space Race 2: Orbital Burn , here are some helpful tips and FAQs to help miners make a smooth transition to mainnet.

In Space Race 2, miners started to mine storage faster than ever before. The network reached a total of 530 PiB, the equivalent of more than 10 billion YouTube videos! The main goal of SR2: Orbital Burn is to create test conditions that can correctly simulate the dynamics of the real mainnet network, so that miners can continue to accumulate their operational expertise, and protocol developers can analyze and improve network performance under realistic conditions.

Over the past 4 weeks since the end of SR1, we have seen huge improvements in network operation, stability, efficiency, and resiliency over the course of 8 large Lotus releases. These releases include our first Filecoin Improvement Proposal (FIP) to reduce window error failure fees (Lotus 0.8.0), a major migration to make core participant logic inside Filecoin easier to cleanly upgrade (Lotus 0.9.0), and even our first state-breaking fix (Lotus 0.10.0).

Miners also made significant improvements to the stability, scalability, and efficiency of storage mining, while also stress testing transactions as part of Slingshot. Overall, SR2: Orbital Burn was a huge success, adding another 300 PiB in a month!

SR2: Orbital Burn rewards are designed to simulate real-world network conditions by tracking stored sectors, pledged collateral, and block and gas fees collected throughout the competition. To receive rewards, miners participating in SR1 and SR2 only need to continue operating their miners through the mainnet transition on October 15.

From the mainnet era:

1. All committed sectors will be migrated to the mainnet with their corresponding capacity - helping miners to start mining new blocks immediately and receive rewards.

2. Miners will also receive the pledged collateral of all sectors as rewards, which will belong to the miners when the miner's sector expires (by default, 540 days after sealing).

3. Block rewards earned in the space race will continue to be distributed linearly for 180 days since the block was mined. (Note: If we land FIP-0004 soon after mainnet awaiting community approval, future storage mining rewards will receive 25% of the rewards immediately without vesting.)

4. Miners participating in Slingshot will also receive customer payments for storage and retrieval transactions.

These awards recognize the tremendous contributions of miners both large and small who have helped stress-test and improve the network over the past few months. This has been a critical, highly productive time in the evolution of the Filecoin network. Thank you so much for making the Filecoin network and community even stronger!

During the Space Race, we ran various testnet FIL faucets to compensate miners for onboarding and normal network operations. In preparation for the mainnet, and to limit abuse and gaming, we have now retired the automated fault compensation service and the staking compensation service (called PCR bot) that helped compensate PreCommit and ProveCommit messages. Starting with the mainnet - miners will need to fund their own continued growth and are solely responsible for managing miners' available balances, owner, control, and worker balances.

To address this, we’ve performed a one-time reimbursement of all miners with negative balances - topping them up to a net available balance of zero so that all miners can enter the mainnet debt-free . In addition to this, we’ve also issued a one-time 100 FIL bonus to all Space Race 2 miners who have been actively proving storage capacity on the network over the past week. Normally, we avoid any rewards that encourage people to create sybil nodes - however, by giving a one-time “surpassing” reward, we specifically want to recognize and benefit the smaller miners who have been working hard to reach the 10 TiB minimum miner size throughout SR1&2 to receive block rewards. Thank you for all your stress testing, issue reporting, and bug fixing to help improve Filecoin!

Space Race 2: Orbital Burn is coming to an end as we transition to mainnet, but the competition for Slingshot continues! To specifically support miners participating in Slingshot to store valuable data on the network, we plan to continue running some small faucets such as PublishDeals and the WindowPoSt reimbursement bot as the network stabilizes. If you are interested in joining Slingshot as a client, you can apply here.

1. When will the Filecoin mainnet be launched?

The Filecoin mainnet will officially start at 148,888 (around 3pm UTC).

2. As a miner on the Filecoin mainnet, what should I do?

As a storage miner, you can commit new storage capacity to the network by submitting new ProveCommits, you can store data for storage clients through PublishingDeals, and you can continue to prove existing committed storage through WindowPoSts.

3. Will my mining settings change if I keep participating in the Space Race?

No, starting with the Lotus 0.9.0 upgrade, all miners have been transitioned to the mainnet f0xxxx address. Your account and miner address will remain unchanged during the mainnet transition.

4. From an operational safety perspective, is there anything I should change before liftoff?

Starting with Lotus 0.9.0, there is a new CLI for managing owner addresses for miners. The wallet associated with the owner address is designed to be offline like a cold wallet, as it should not be used often and is critical to protecting the miner's funds. In a production environment, we strongly recommend using separate owner and worker addresses. See the guide here.

5. How can I help the miners stay stable throughout the lift-off transition?

We recommend that all miners set up a separate control address to submit PoSt windows to the chain to avoid critical, time-sensitive messages getting stuck in the mpool. It is also important to adjust the fee caps set to mitigate gas-related issues. Read this blog post to learn more.

6. What happens if I stop running the miner during the mainnet?

If you shut down your miner and stop actively validating the storage and transactions you have submitted to the network, your miner will lose power on the first missed proof and be fined for missing the proof window after about 24 hours. You will be fined more for each proof period you miss. If you do not reclaim the fines and storage transactions within 14 days, the miner's power will be permanently removed from the network and all outstanding rewards will be consumed.

7. Assuming the original testnet is transitioning to mainnet - will there be a new testnet?

We plan to run many testnets with different configurations. Calibrationnet has been setup as a new long-running testnet that we plan to use for testing new releases and doing state upgrades before doing them in mainnet. It has the same parameters as mainnet but supports 512 MiB sectors for faster testing. We encourage everyone to run a miner here especially before major upgrades!

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