Venus China Tour to More Innovative Blockchain Cities

5 min readJun 8, 2021

Venus is an implementation of the Filecoin in Go, the program language that the Filecoin miners are familiar with. Now, with the power from IPFSForce community, Venus has came back to Filecoin mainnet with the new feature — DISTRIBUTED MINING POOL.

Recently, the team has brought the newest update and practice-based cases in 1st quarter to three China blockchain innovative cities — Chengdu, Suzhou and Nanjing.

Joss Hua, lead of Venus community, presented the most-updated sharing to all representatives of government, researchers and enterprises, about how to lower the barrier for small miners to participate in Filecoin network. In the coming days, Venus team will head to more cities in China to introduce web 3.0, distributed storage and next-generation internet.

Why Venus?

Series of implementations with compatibility and interoperability are required on one blockchain. Though each of the implementation has its unsolved issues, the complementary caused by these issues from different implementations helps reduce the crash on the blockchain network. And Venus is one of them, that plans to assemble all small and medium miners together as a union.

Currently, there are more than 2700 active miners on Filecoin network that have provided 6EiB data and over 50PiB data growth.

According to the data distribution map, the top miners have occupied a big proportion of network data storage. On account of the dynamic changes from different Filecoin ecosystem players like software providers, hardware providers, etc., it’s increasingly hard for small miners to continue the power growth.

At the same time, the Lucky Value of the small miners are also quite unstable. And little growth of the active miners and the slow growth of small miners’ storage power also indicate that Filecoin mining pool needs to be more friendly to them.

In the 1st quarter (March to May, 2021), Venus has supported Distributed Mining Pool (or Mining Union) to encourage more and more small miners to have a lower barrier to entry into Filecoin network and ecosystem.

As one of the new miners pertained to Venus, you can store all your data in your local node that has also been involved in Venus distributed mining pool.

As long as the network is accessible, the miner can create or have access to the node provided by a third party or venus miner union. The node can start or stop the packaging by specific requirements and the block rewards will be fairly allot to the counter-miner.

Since the probability of earning the block reward is proportional to the amount of storage the miner contributes to the Filecoin network, Venus team is now longing for more rules setting to rationalize the allotment. For example, to allot the earning of the mining pool fairly according to data proportion to protect the earning stability. We are now designing it and also welcome more advice from miners.

To all Participators

We define the system of Venus open-source collaboration to public modules and independent modules. In the architecture, venus, venus-miner, venus-auth, venus-messager and venus-market are public modules and venus-sealer and venus-wallet are independent modules.

Miners only need to run some independent modules during the open-source collaboration. Actually, all modules of Venus are protocol-oriented. Miners can deploy all or part of the public modules locally, so the deployment can be then more flexible.

In the design and with the permission from miners, venus will select the appropriate node to store data according to the data specific access requirements, so that the data is closer to the real application scenario.

Venus now supports all newly-created cluster and cluster in running. Upon the requirement, miners can choose to use venus or covert other implementation freely.

Venus’ performance of multi-cluster management is outstanding since its public module can serve different clusters at the same time. The cost saving of hardware equipment and the unified management are increasingly improved with increased number of clusters.

Next Step

Based on the difference design and deployment process, problems on chain can greatly reduce when different implementation can be evenly adopted and it is tightly in line with the interest of every ecosystem players.

Open source and project audit are two critical criteria to evaluate a blockchain project. Now, venus is in the final stage of the audit process, which means venus v1.0 be on the air very soon.

And in the future work, we will continue the development involving the storage and retrieval of real data, the winning ticket distribution with miner union, the improvement of TPS, message stability, data access and the efficiency of data package scheduling.