Slingshot Week One Recap

It’s been an exciting week with the kickoff of Filecoin Slingshot, a two-part competition for storage clients and developers to deploy their products to the testnet. Phase One of this competition (“Onboard”), which started on September 23, 2020 and runs through October 14, aims to onboard 1PiB of real, useful data to the Filecoin network. Phase Two (“Scale”) aims to onboard 10PiB of data. Between the two phases, participants have a chance at getting a share of a prize pool of up to 500,000 FIL based on their network storage commitments!

Slingshot is part of Filecoin’s Ignite series of events, and is a collaborative event intended to stress-test the network and encourage participation from storage users all over the world. Space Race 2: Slingshot is designed specifically for storage clients, app developers, tooling providers, and other community members. Teams can participate in the competition in one of two ways:

1. Build an end-user facing application that stores application and user data to Filecoin.
2. Store data from a curated list of data collections and create an accompanying UI to utilize and access this data.

To date, we’ve had more than 100 teams sign up for the competition, making more than 26,000 storage deals so far. Slingshot is accepting applications through the end of the competition! You can register to participate here.

Here’s where the competition stands as of 20:00 UTC Friday, September 25, two days into the competition:

Week One in Review

On September 23rd, we launched the competition with our kickoff event. During this event, the Slingshot team introduced the rules, announced upcoming events and shared guidance for participants entering the competition. In addition, Andrew Hill, co-founder and CEO of Textile, advised teams on how to accelerate their products with Textile’s tools, and Juan Benet, founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, offered ideas for different datasets and applications.

On September 25, we held our first Slingshot Master Class, Filecoin 101, where @ribasushi, a developer at Protocol Labs, covered the basics of Filecoin in a hands-on tutorial. Topics included the concepts underpinning Filecoin, using the CLI, and making deals with miners.

What’s Ahead

We have more amazing events coming up, including more master classes, open office hours, workshops, and a series called “How We Built This” that showcases development teams and how they built their projects and/or companies. You can always find the latest events schedule here.

Here’s our event lineup for the upcoming week!
* Intro to Powergate with Andrew Hill, CEO of Textile: Monday, September 28 at 3:30pm UTC / 8:30am PT
* Filecoin 201 with ribasushi, Engineer at Protocol Labs: Tuesday, September 29 at 4pm UTC / 9am PT
* Intro to Buckets with Andrew Hill, CEO of Textile: Wednesday, September 30 at 4pm UTC / 9am PT
* Lotus Office Hours with the Filecoin lotus team: Wednesday, September 30 at 5pm UTC / 10am PT
* How We Built Slate with Jimmy Lee, co-founder of Slate: Thursday, October 1 at 4pm UTC / 9am PT

Join us!

If you’re ready to register for Slingshot, you can do so here! Check out the Slingshot website to track all the action in the Slingshot competition. Make sure you join the Filecoin Slack to connect with the amazing community of developers building on the Filecoin Network.

Thank you to all the individuals who are participating in the competition! We’re excited to see the innovative projects that are part of this competition as we work toward the common goal of onboarding real, valuable data to the Filecoin network.