Introducing the Filecoin Storage Provider Incubation Center

The Filecoin Foundation is committed to growing and supporting the Filecoin ecosystem — miners, developers, and storage clients alike. To date, more than 2,500 miners participate in the Filecoin economy, collectively contributing more than 7 EiB of storage capacity.

The original idea behind Filecoin is that anyone can contribute to creating this new storage backbone for the internet — regardless of size, resources, or computing power. While many large mining companies are already up and running on the network, the Foundation wants to encourage more small and medium-sized miners to join us in our mission to build a more robust and resilient internet infrastructure and preserve humanity’s most important information.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Filecoin Storage Provider (Miner) Incubation Center. In collaboration with the Venus Team, the Center will provide financial support and educational resources to smaller miners around the world working with the Venus implementation of Filecoin.

About the Storage Provider Incubation Center

The Storage Provider Incubation Center brings together the resources of the Filecoin Foundation and the Venus Team to provide funding and technical support to small and medium-sized miners.

The idea is to make it simple and convenient for small miners to join the network by lowering the barrier to entry. There are two ways for miners to participate:

• The Filecoin Storage Provider Incubation Center Program aims to bring more small miners to the Filecoin network with financial support from the Filecoin Foundation and technical support from the Venus Team.
• The Venus Master Fellowship Program is a sub-project of the Filecoin Storage Provider Incubation Center designed to incubate teams or individuals capable of providing the service of the Filecoin distributed mining pool service based on Venus to improve the productivity of miners and the fault tolerance of the Filecoin network.

Maintained by the IPFS Force community, Venus is one of four implementations in development on the Filecoin ecosystem. Venus is unique because it supports a distributed mining pool, which is a cost-effective way to reduce the overall cost of hardware maintenance and save time when mining on the Filecoin network. Thus, it can bring more miners to the Filecoin network with lower barriers to entry.

Thanks to Venus’s Distributed Mining Pool Architecture (link previously available but now unavailable), the Incubation Center will run shared modules. Miners can start mining with just venus-sealer and venus-wallet along with the shared modules maintained by the Incubation Center. Then, they can run with one or more nodes at the same time.

About the Incubation Center Program

Miners must seal at least 64 sectors per day (2TiB) to join the Incubation Center. Miners can continue to participate in the program until their storage power reaches 1PiB or when they have participated in the program for more than 90 days, to allow others who meet the requirements to participate. Access to shared modules is free for participating miners who join this program.

The first term of the Miner Incubation Center will run from July 26, 2021 through October 24, 2021.

About the Masters Fellowship Program

To join the Venus Master Fellowship Program, miners must continuously contribute to Filecoin network development with full experience of Filecoin’s coding and mining. Selected Masters will provide consulting services and technical support to the miners in the Incubation Center to help ensure that miners can continue to expand the distributed mining pool service in the Filecoin network.

Specifically, Venus Masters must be willing to:

• Provide services to at least five miners; services include helping miners connect to the incubator’s mining pool with venus-sealer/wallet, and providing more storage resources on the Filecoin network.
• Serve in at least one full phase of the project.
• Sync with miners in the mining pool during debugging or version upgrades to make necessary preparations after receiving the notification.
• Coordinate testing with the Venus Dev team to verify the quality of service during the version upgrades.
• Provide feedback on the tools/implementations they use to ensure the continuous improvement of Venus miners’ experience.
• Provide feedback and suggestions on productivity and load balance, such as energy consumption, cost efficiency, etc.

In exchange for their work, Masters will receive access to a prize pool of more than 1,000 FIL tokens, which will be distributed based on the length and quality of service. At the end of each phase, Masters can choose to continue their work by applying to be a part of the next phase.

Center Goals

We hope this program can empower miners around the world to participate in the Filecoin network. In the first year of the program, we hope to onboard more than 165 new miners. Note that the Filecoin Community Code of Conductapplies to this program.

Learn more about the program tracks by joining the Filecoin Foundation and the Venus team at the Filecoin Meetup on July 13, at 4 pm PDT.

How to Apply

To join the Incubation Center Program, fill out this Application Form with as much information as possible. Applications for this first wave of candidates open on July 12 and close July 19.

To join the Masters Fellowship Program, fill out this Application Form with as much information as possible. Applications for this first wave of candidates open on September 13 and close September 20.

Miners who have any issues joining the Incubation Center can reach out to the Venus team by email or on Filecoin Slack: fil-venus.