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One Year of Onchain Programmability and Smart Contracts on Filecoin
The Upload V31
It’s been one year since the launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), which brought onchain programmability and smart contracts to Filecoin mainnet and solidified Filecoin’s role as the Layer-1 blockchain uniquely positioned to power an open data economy.
As of March 2024, over 800 FVM projects – drawn from hackathons, startups, and builders on Filecoin – created about 680,000 wallets and deployed 3,000+ total contracts. In this issue of The Upload, we dive into the tremendous network milestones and brand-new use cases that FVM has unlocked on Filecoin in the last year.
Unleashing Creativity and Control
Over the last year, dapp and smart contract builders have developed features, integrations, and resources to enable a variety of projects built on Filecoin. With FVM, dapps can tap into the primitives on Filecoin with valuable workflows including storage renewal contracts, perpetual storage endowments, data access control, composability with compute protocols, anchoring subnets, and much more.
FVM enables a more resilient, accessible, and decentralized cloud while providing opportunities to reward individual contributions to the data economy by unlocking new use cases. For example:
Data onboarding and management tools automate storage dealmaking. Plus, programmatic storage enables the option for automatic or user-defined conditional upload, retrieval, and management of storage deals on Filecoin.
Compute-over-data composability is uniquely enabled by FVM, on which builders can use programmability to tie off-chain compute with programmatic storage. Given that Filecoin storage providers have compute resources (such as GPUs and CPUs) colocated with their data, Filecoin is positioned to be the home for the outputs of these valuable datasets.
Anchoring subnets allows new networks to deploy on top of Filecoin, anchored in the Filecoin blockchain. This is especially attractive for compute networks, hot storage layers, and DataDAOs looking to build services and utility composable with the Filecoin economy.
Empowering the Next Generation of Builders
FVM’s full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) helps many new-to-Filecoin developers make rapid progress when deploying their projects on the Filecoin blockchain, fueling incredible builder growth across the network since FVM's launch.
The Filecoin Orbit Ambassador program hosted over 30 FVM workshops and more than 10 FVM hackathons in just as many cities to introduce builders to Filecoin. These events generated 150 new projects deployed on Filecoin, IPFS, or FVM test- and mainnets, like a voting machine Filecoin dapp from a team in Tanzania.
The wider developer community also demonstrated high engagement with the Filecoin network over the past year alongside the launch of FVM, leading to hundreds of new projects using Filecoin in hackathons with ETHGlobal, ETHDenver, Encode, DevFolio, Huddle01, and DoraHacks.
What’s Ahead
The Filecoin network is valuable infrastructure for enabling decentralized AI, compute, and DePIN, sitting at the cross-section of many scarce resources in the world.
The coming year will bring even more decentralized services to unleash the utility of the Filecoin network. In addition to FVM, Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) was also introduced in 2023. IPC is a revolutionary blockchain technology that powers planetary-scale Web3 apps. Teams already building using FVM-based smart contracts, tooling, and dapps can effortlessly transition and harness the power of IPC to scale hot storage layers, compute networks, CDNs, indexing engines, databases, aggregators, storage provider collectives, retrievability networks, QoS evaluators, and more.
Together, onchain programmability and smart contracts unlocked through FVM, paired with innovation across the ecosystem, are laying foundational work to further improve the security and usability of Filecoin and empowering developers, teams, and other contributors to build the next generation of the internet.
Network News
Charting the Path of Filecoin With Vinny Lingham. Learn more about the evolving value proposition of Filecoin and the untapped opportunities and challenges in the decentralized storage space with one of the leading advocates for the Filecoin and IPFS ecosystems.
Missing Denver? Find all the talks from Filecoin Foundation's booth on our ETHDenver playlist. Discover how founders, developers, and organizations across the ecosystem are coming together to build toward the network's future.
Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) celebrated Sunshine Week, a commemoration of the importance of public records and open government, alongside its project partners working on these issues. To learn more about how FFDW, Muckrock, Starling Lab, and the Internet Archive are leveraging the Filecoin network and IPFS to preserve open records, visit ffdweb.org.
The Decentralized Storage Alliance (DSA) announced a leap forward in zk proof computation on the Filecoin network. FF is a founding member of the DSA, which recently released cryptographic processing improvements that improve zero-knowledge proof (zk proofs) processing within the Filecoin proving process. These advances optimize several key steps in the proof process via CPU and GPU optimizations. The result is an 80% reduction in cost and latency for proof generation – saving storage providers money, and increasing flexibility in how they use their hardware.
Build with Us
Register for FIL Hong Kong hosted by ND Labs, supported by FF, April 5-8, 2024. Join us for storage provider-focused lightning talks, workshops, and plenty of coworking space for the Filecoin ecosystem! If you’re a Filecoin storage provider or want to explore decentralized storage for your business, join us for exciting talks focused on Web3 trends, decentralized storage, DePIN, and more.
Thank you to our FIL Hong Kong Newsletter sponsors, SINSO, FILLiquid, and Repl. Be sure to register for FIL Hong Kong to learn more from these ecosystem contributors and gain insights into the latest developments of the Filecoin network!
Calling all Filecoin developers: The Developer Working Group kicked off on March 1. Ecosystem contributors who intend to build, research, or otherwise support development activities on top of the Filecoin protocol are encouraged to participate by joining the #dev-wg Slack channel and attending the working group's quarterly calls.
Ecosystem Spotlight
FileMarket assists users of EVM-compatible blockchain wallets to engage in digital goods creation to store their files directly in the wallet, protect against unauthorized access to content, and monetize through selling access on a public storefront. Filecoin's unique combination of programmability with storage primitives ensures a secure and decentralized system for P2P trading of digital goods.
Governance
Nv22 Dragon has been moved to April 11. There are four FIPs in scope for this upgrade: