Filecoin releases its public testnet

The first public testnet for the Filecoin protocol is now live. Prospective storage miners and clients can start experimenting with the mining hardware requirements and the data storage/retrieval capabilities of the network. The testnet also allows developers to begin building Filecoin-based applications via network-compatible APIs. For those interested, only Filecoin’s lotus implementation supports access to the new testnet — though the team plans to interoperate with other implementations, including Filecoin’s Go client, soon.

Why it matters:

• Despite rolling in almost six months late, this launch marks a major milestone for Filecoin en route to a possible Mar. or Apr. 2020 mainnet release. Mainnet would be a welcomed sight for Filecoin ICO investors, who now have waited almost two and a half years to see some tangible results. Of course, investors may have to wait even longer for a liquidity event, depending on their chosen vesting schedule. Learn more about Filecoin’s token dynamics and vesting schedule in our Filecoin asset profile.
• Mining on Filecoin is not related to Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining. Instead of competing based on computing power to win block rewards, Filcoin mining uses a “storage power consensus” system. In this system, miners that put more storage on the network gain an advantage towards winning block rewards. All Filecoin mining is GPU-based, and miners must pledge at least 512 GiB (~550 GB) of disk storage to be considered eligible for mining testnet blocks.