Filecoin is almost ready

This Sunday, in the newsletter ‘This week in three words’ (subscription button at the bottom of the article) I suggested reading the Filecoin team’s periodic update on their project, which finally now has a roadmap that already includes version 1.0.0.

For those who don’t know it, Filecoin is a decentralized infrastructure project based on blockchain and IPFS, created by Protocol Labs, a high-tech startup composed of Ph.Ds and students from MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Filecoin raised, in 2017, over 230 million dollars to create the definitive decentralized infrastructure, with original consensus protocols and capable of guaranteeing data integrity and veracity.

During this quarter’s update, there were the following announcements, which I simplify below to give an idea of where this project is going.

• Alpha-net launch date announced: September 25, 2019
• Testnet launch date announced: November 11, 2019

• Mainnet launch period announced: March 2020

• Devnet: tests recorded peaks of 500 nodes connected simultaneously, with 17 Petabytes of memory space stored.

• Development code available to developers for external contributions;
• Simulation and validation confirmed for the ‘Expected Consensus’ protocol;
• Optimizations to Proof-of-Replication;
• Launch of developer grants;

Filecoin is a huge project, with an ever-growing community of developers and hype built over time that has created anticipation like few blockchain projects so far. We will see if they manage to meet expectations.

Other interesting things I found:

• 🖥 command line tool to distribute a static site on IPFS (I’ll try using it on this site!):[ipfs-deploy] (https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-deploy)
• 👨🏽‍💻 web app for real-time collaboration on markdown documents via p2p protocol (again IPFS): PeerPad
• 💻 IPFS-based search engine (but indexes normal sites): IPSE
• 💾 How to run your DApp on IPFS with an Ethereum Name Service: tutorial

For more information on the update, you can refer to the blog post on the official site.