Filecoin Storage Deal Success Rate Lower than 50%, when Space Race?
The Filecoin Testnet incentive program, also known as the Space Race has again been delayed. The low deal success rate, congested mempools, and insufficient test coins are some of the major problems that miners have encountered recently.
The Storage low Deal Success rate
As we are approaching the mainnet, the SpaceRace performs as the last major test before the launch. At the writing of this article, the Space Race has not kicked off as the Protocol Labs originally scheduled.
To win the reward in the Space Race, the prerequisite includes “successfully completing TB-level real storage orders and retrieval orders” and “executing a complete cycle for one sector” before competing with the participants’ storage capacity.
Therefore, in the Filecoin Space Race Preview Dashboard, in addition to the “Raw byte Storage power”, Protocol Labs also deliberately added three more parameters “Sector life cycle”, “Storage deal success rate” and “Retrieval deal success rate. According to Protocol Labs, the Space Race will not be launched until most miners have a success rate of more than 75%. Below is the current success rate of a few top miners at the writing of this article.
The average storage deal success rate is only 32%, and the average retrieval success rate is 0%. Many top miners have a success rate of 0.
A few reasons have caused such low storage success rate, including bugs in the current version of code and miner connectivity to the deal bot.
Filecoin’s official deal bot is located in Europe, and it is not friendly to most Chinese miners. The imperfect node code makes this process even more difficult.
In fact, apart from the official deal robot, most of the orders on-chain come from third-party testing.
From the Filecoin browser calibration.filfox.info, you can see that since the re-set of the network on August 1, more than 9,200 orders have been completed on the chain, of which more than 2,000 are the initial configuration of the genesis block and the actual orders completed by the miners. On average, there are 1000+ transactions per day, which shows there is no problem with the overall deal ability of miners. With the merge of related codes, the deal success rate will increase accordingly. Jumping from 20% to 75% is not as difficult as it seems now.
Congested Mempool
Similar to blockchains like Bitcoin, Filecoin also has a mempool to store transactions waiting to be put on-chain. At present, there are nearly 30,000 transactions in Filecoin’s mempool, most of which are stuck due to the low transaction fees given and low incentive for miners to package them. The amoung of transactions in Mempool is not a huge number, comparing with Etherum, which has over 145,000 transactions in its mempool.
The real problem is that Filecoin’s processing power (TPS) cannot meet the basic needs of the chain.
Filecoin involves a large amount of verification, especially the verification of zero-knowledge proof. The amount of calculation for these verifications is much greater than that of ordinary transactions, and the sealing of new sectors and submission of proofs all involve the verification process. Because it adopts a Gas model similar to Ethereum, Filecoin’s block size is also calibrated with Gas. The higher the cost of each transaction, the smaller the number of transactions that can be included in each block. Therefore, in order to ensure that the transaction is included in priority, there is only one way: pay higher gas fees. This makes TPS worse. Because of this reason, small miners who cannot submit proofs can only be slashed, which seems to be a vicious circle.
Faucet
Since Filecoin officially added pledge collateral recently, the testnet token also becomes highly scarce. Every time new testnet token is available from the faucet of the testnet, it will be robbed by miners. Without enough testnet tokens, miners simple cannot mine. Without mining, there will be no coins. Miners are trapped in an endless loop. So a strange phenomenon appeared in Filecoin’s slack: miners “begging” for testnet token in the slack group.
What we are seeing now in the test net is rehearsal for the mainnet launch. Although the test currency does not have any value, you cannot participate in the testnet without it. If many miners are blocked from the reward testnet for this reason, it will also be a heavy blow to the Filecoin ecosystem. Therefore, miners all pay close attention to the potential change of the economic model.
Protocol Labs has been tackling the above issues, and also put forward some ideas about the economic model and GasLimit issues. In addition, a lot of code is waiting to be merged and hopefully, it can solve a lot of problems we see today.
It seems we won’t be able to see the start of Space Race this week. Accoding to Protocol Labs, “once the majority of top miners are able to achieve a >75% deal success rate — they will start the Space Race! If by ~Aug 12 we still haven’t reached this goal, they plan to proceed with Space Race for eligible participants”. It seems we are only days away from the Space Race, one way or another. We believe that these current problems are temporary, and hopefully see you Space Race Leaderboard soon.
Happy mining!
