Today, we are excited to open several repos on GitHub, and invite everybody to join us on GitHub. Come learn about Filecoin, play with the code, and contribute to development. As described in this prior update, we made the hard choice of starting our repos privately to avoid distractions and develop quickly. Now, we have reached our next big milestone. If you are a developer, researcher, adventurous miner or user, or just want to support our efforts, this is an exciting time to get involved!

Please note: Filecoin is in heavy development. Code is changing drastically day to day. At this stage, the repos, devnets, and other resources are for development. This release is aimed for developers, researchers, and community members who want to help make Filecoin. Miners and users who seek to use Filecoin will want to wait for a future release (likely, the testnet milestone). Read our Getting Started Guide to find out more.

What is in this release?

A few hours ago, we opened up the Filecoin Project repos on GitHub, development networks (the user and nightly devnets), chat channels (Slack, Matrix, IRC coming soon), discussion forum, and project management tools. Here’s what this means:

You can dive into our codebase (go-filecoin, rust-fil-proofs)

You can contribute to the Filecoin Project by filing issues and submitting PRs

You can ask any and all questions on the forum and collaborate with others working on the Filecoin Project

You can read and fully participate in all of our research and dev team’s conversations on the chat channels

You can install go-filecoin and set up a Filecoin node for testing

You can connect to a devnet and make experimental deals with other nodes on that devnet

You can use our dev tools – a network statistics dashboard and a block explorer – to see what is happening on the different devnets

You can test and benchmark Filecoin’s proofs-of-replication (PoReps) on your own machine

You can compete in the Replication Game

Notable repos opening up:

filecoin-project/go-filecoin: the first implementation of the Filecoin Protocol

filecoin-project/specs: the specification of the Filecoin Protocol

filecoin-project/rust-fil-proofs: proof-of-replication and other crypto components

filecoin-project/replication-game: proof-of-replication optimization competition

filecoin-project/research: open problems, ideas, and discussions

and many more

And, as we explain in our broader Q3/Q4 update, there is much, much more.

Important Note

This is not the Filecoin mainnet launch. The project repos and devnets are mainly for developer and researcher testing. Miners should not invest in mining hardware based on any current specs or implementations, as they are certainly going to change. We will host a Q&A session for miners in late Q1 2019, and will update the community when a date/time have been set. Please sign up to the Miner Testing Form to be notified when features are ready for testing by prospective Filecoin miners.