Filecoin Slingshot: Launching into orbit

On Friday 15 October at 14:44hrs UTC, the Filecoin network pivoted to mainnet. 🚀 🥳 🎉

This long-awaited launch marks a new chapter for decentralization, with Filecoin's s IPFS-based cooperative storage cloud providing the ability to store files and distribute content at scale without relying on the incumbent centralized (and expensive) cloud. Indeed, at the time of writing, storage on Filecoin costs a fraction of current market-leading cloud storage, perhaps just two or three per cent of current market prices.

Filecoin's mainnet launch coincided with 'Slingshot - the second phrase of the Space Race competition, which the AKASHA team, led by our Engineering Lead, Marius Darila, was pleased to take part in.

Slingshot's raison d'être was to prepare the Filecoin network for mainnet by increasing the number of valuable applications storing real data on the network. Storage clients, application developers, and tooling developers all competed and were rewarded for storing real, valuable, and usable data with Filecoin, from a total prize pool of 500,000 tokens.

Slingshot participants competed in a number of categories, which included awards for the largest volume of data stored, and for the most complicated application deployed on the network. Despite there being no specific category for social networks, AKASHA still qualified for the Booster Award.

Unlike the first phase of the SR competition, which was aimed squarely at miners for the purpose of getting as committed capacity on the network as possible, Slingshot was specifically aimed at storing curated datasets, and therefore had a strong focus on the quality of the data stored on the network.

The AKASHA team uploaded two years' of profile data, posts, and comments from the legacy AKASHA World beta. This data went through a rigorous validation process before it could be uploaded, based in part on our historic community moderation system which relies on user voting. This ensured that only quality data was added to the Filecoin network.

While the volume of data that AKASHA contributed to the Slingshot competition cannot compare with other participants, the future potential for this way of storing data is significant. Once Ethereum World launches, there will be an enormous amount of data that needs to be stored in a secure and decentralized way, and the potential for Filecoin to help here is truly exciting.

Congratulations to the Filecoin team for a successful launch and to the winners of the Slingshot competition. 🚀

To learn more about Filecoin, visit their website.

The header image is courtesy of Tom Fisk on Pexels.