Last week, we shared the results of the first of two challenges we sponsored for the recently-concluded Spark University Hackathon. This week, we shine a spotlight on the winners of our second challenge: building an app that showcases the convenience of interoperability between Filecoin and IPFS.

For the past 3 weeks, miners across the community have been participating in the Filecoin Space Race to onboard as much storage as possible to the Testnet. We’re thrilled to announce Space Race 2, a second phase of competition building on the massive network grown during Space Race so far. This gives us an opportunity to continue testing and improving Filecoin on a network at scale, as we prepare for mainnet.

As a part of the Space Race events program, on September 9th the Filecoin team hosted another live AMA with the Filecoin community, answering questions on Space Race, cryptoeconomics, Filecoin mining. Our engineering team also helped miners troubleshoot some common issues.

The Spark University Hackathon has come to a close! Over the last two months, hundreds of participants came together to build novel blockchain solutions to address specific challenges. We’re excited to announce the winners of the first of two challenges we proposed: building a system for storing, retrieving, and verifying research data with Filecoin.

As a part of the Space Race events program, the Filecoin team are hosting weekly live AMAs with the Filecoin community. On September 2nd our team hosted the first of two AMAs, answering 20+ questions on Space Race, cryptoeconomics, and Filecoin mining. In addition, we helped miners troubleshoot certain issues.

At the end of last year, we successfully completed the first phase of our trusted setup also known as the “powers of tau” ceremony. At the end of July, we finished our second phase of the trusted setup - generating secure parameters for the 6 circuits we’ll be using for mainnet.

There are relatively few freedoms when choosing a cloud storage provider. A few players with massive networks of data centers and brand recognition make competition very difficult for new entrants. Migrating data from one provider to another can be slow, laborious, and costly, and interoperability is not guaranteed. We envision a future where interfaces are standardized, and anyone can easily participate as a provider in a market for storage.

More than three dozen teams took home prizes at the HackFS Finale. The amazing array of projects created within the month-long hackathon covered almost every facet of the decentralized web – from communications tools, to gaming, to dev tools, to new innovations in DeFi. We’ll keep tracking the progress of these teams and others.

Around the world, thousands of individuals and teams are devoting their energy, talent, and resources to making Filecoin an important building block of the internet’s evolving infrastructure. As we saw these past few weeks during HackFS, the products and services these teams are building are truly revolutionary.

Our August 2020 roadmap update covers progress made since the last roadmap update - with a special celebration of today’s launch of the Filecoin Space Race, our incentivized testnet competition.