The Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) has officially launched on the mainnet, marking the arrival of the Filecoin smart contract era
The Filecoin community is pleased to announce that the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) has been successfully launched.Author: Filecoin Network
Today, the Filecoin community is excited to announce the successful launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) (http://fvm.dev/). Starting from epoch 2,683,348 (March 14, 3:14 PM UTC), the Filecoin blockchain can now support smart contracts and user programmability through FVM. This will unlock the immense potential of an open data economy.
This marks a significant milestone on Filecoin's expansive roadmap. Filecoin's vision is to bring open, publicly verifiable characteristics to the three core pillars supporting the data economy: storage, computation, and content distribution. With FVM, developers can deploy smart contracts and plan for data storage, governance, and monetization in open markets. Just as smartphones became "smart" by enabling the writing and running of apps that far exceeded the capabilities of factory-installed software, the freedom and space for innovation allowed smartphones to take control of the world. Similarly, through FVM, developers can deploy smart contracts and plan for data storage, governance, and monetization in open markets.
The launch of FVM also initiates the final phase of the Filecoin Master Plan (https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/the-filecoin-masterplan/). This plan aims to bring the capabilities of large-scale data computation and empower network-level applications to the world's largest decentralized storage network.
The release of FVM also solidifies Filecoin's unique position as a Layer 1 protocol supporting the open data economy. Many leading Web3 projects have announced plans to use, support, or integrate FVM to enhance their services.
Unlocking the Open Data Economy for Web3
The FVM virtual machine not only brings us closer to robust, usable decentralized cloud services but also enables thousands of developers, storage providers, entrepreneurs, and global network participants to own the data economy in unprecedented ways, rewarding individuals for their contributions. For example, the AI tool Waterlily generates images in specific artistic styles based on prompts and uses tokens to directly reward creators of original AI training data.
In the past few months, after experimenting, iterating, and strengthening solutions on the Filecoin testnet, over 150 development teams have begun deploying FVM products and services on the Filecoin mainnet, with Waterlily being one of them. The ability to deploy DataDAOs and dApps based on FVM (some of which were previously difficult to build) has inspired over 16,000 developers in the Filecoin ecosystem.
FVM also brings the Web3 world closer to the Filecoin ecosystem: the first runtime launched on FVM is the well-known EVM virtual machine. While other virtual machine runtimes will be launched on FVM over time, the initial choice of EVM pays tribute to the friends in the Ethereum ecosystem and their robust developer tools community and thriving tool ecosystem. The entire Filecoin community warmly welcomes the FVM integration solutions brought by projects like Ankr, Axelar, Brave, Celer, Ocean, Sushi, and Tellor.
"We are excited to integrate FVM and leverage its powerful smart contract capabilities to enhance Sushiswap. With FVM, we can unlock the frontier of decentralized finance, providing users with more innovative and efficient solutions. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the Filecoin team to build the future of DeFi."* - Jared Grey, Sushi CEO***
The products and services that can be developed with FVM represent new avenues for growth and value capture, leveraging existing, emerging, or entirely new market opportunities worth trillions of dollars. Ultimately, FVM and the Filecoin network can support the development of a range of applications, markets, and organizations that will dwarf existing centralized cloud service providers and their users in both depth and breadth. Investors are excited about this potential and have already planned to allocate millions of dollars to help businesses in the Filecoin ecosystem seize these market opportunities. For example, Longhash and Graph Paper Capital have launched accelerator programs focused on FVM.
FVM also aims to unlock more opportunities for the network's storage providers, who have contributed over 13 EiB of storage capacity, making Filecoin the largest public storage network in the world. Since the mainnet launch, storage providers have stored hundreds of TiB of customer data, locked 130 million FIL as collateral, and continue to earn block rewards and income from storage transaction proposals. Since the launch of FVM, distributed financial services built by developers will make it easier for FIL, a crucial part of the Filecoin storage network, to be lent to storage providers to help increase storage capacity and utilization. Overall, third-party developers (such as Glif (https://glif.io/), FILL Pool (https://fillpool.space/), Filet Finance (https://www.filet.finance/), etc.) are planning to provide over 5 million FIL through DeFi services to storage providers participating in the upcoming Pilot projects in the next few months.
FVM enables third-party DeFi solutions (such as FIL lending for storage providers) to boost growth and enhance the capacity and availability of the Filecoin storage network.
Key players in Web3 are using the Filecoin virtual machine for lending, perpetual storage, cross-chain, verification, and more.
FVM is transforming the way we interact with the Web3 ecosystem, sparking collaborations with noteworthy Web3 projects: from FVM-based lending services to perpetual storage solutions, developer tools, DeFi, and cross-chain solutions. Let's dive deeper.
DeFi Lending Protocols
FVM allows developers to build new applications to help storage providers acquire FIL for collateral. Specifically, FIL token holders will soon be able to invest their FIL through smart contract-based protocols to support the operations of storage providers. These protocols will have their own set of standards to select storage providers in need of FIL loans and will adopt different methods to set lending terms and requirements. Connecting Filecoin token holders more efficiently with storage providers can accelerate data growth on the network and enable new storage providers to bring their services to the network more effectively.
Perpetual Storage and Data DAOs
Before the launch of FVM, storage transaction proposals were not perpetual and had to be updated every 1.5 years. Now, FVM allows users to store data once and lets repair and replication bots manage the repetitive tasks of creating storage transaction proposals. Using smart contracts, users can plan wallets funded with FIL to finance permanent data storage and can choose services among different storage providers over time. This gives users the ability to store data long-term (some blockchains claim they can do this too) while benefiting from Filecoin's verifiable storage proof mechanism (https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf), ensuring that the network correctly stores and replicates their data.
Data DAOs can also leverage perpetual storage. By using an FVM actor contract to coordinate and manage the data uploaded to the DAO, they can ensure compliance with certain standards to maintain a scalable and clean dataset. FVM actor contracts can also be used to mint tokens or NFTs to distribute to members participating in the DAO, incentivizing their actions. Combining perpetual storage with Data DAOs offers limitless creative potential for distributed data management, payments, and governance. Ocean, NFT.Storage, and Waterlily are just a few examples of those using FVM to transform community governance storage use cases.
Through FVM, NFT.storage can use programmable smart contracts to automatically renew storage transactions—taking the first step towards becoming a data DAO that preserves data along the global cultural industry chain!
Cross-Chain Solutions
The Filecoin virtual machine can integrate with leading Web3 blockchains to achieve cross-chain communication (such as Polygon and Ethereum) and cross-chain liquidity (such as Celer and Axelar). This will enhance the data capabilities of various blockchains. For example, dApp users on other chains can access and pay for Filecoin services (such as verifiable storage and distributed computing through smart contract calls, as well as existing liquidity in the form of wrapped tokens).
"The Axelar-Filecoin integration is the first use case of different attribute chains combining through interoperability. For example, DeFi across different blockchains will be able to combine with distributed storage, regardless of what services they want to build."* - Sergey Gorbunov, Co-founder of Axelar***
FVM will support decentralized finance, providing services for the flow of value in on-chain and off-chain FIL, other tokens, and fiat currencies. Through FVM, there will be new ways to trade via wallets like Metamask and Glif, and mainstream trading platforms (such as Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken) will also provide corresponding support. You can natively exchange other assets on-chain (including bridged ETH, BTC, and other stablecoins) to implement on-chain native asset management strategies. Users can find the lowest fee paths and develop insurance and hedging strategies using cross-chain decentralized exchanges (such as Squid), a range of automated market-making mechanisms (such as SushiSwap and FilSwap), and derivatives (such as Thetanauts). This enables the realization of native asset management strategies.
DeSci, Video, Gaming, and More
The combination of smart contracts with content addressing and verifiable perpetual storage offers limitless opportunities for distributed data management, payments, and governance. The launch of FVM will unlock new paradigms for video creation, streaming storage (such as Livepeer), social data preservation and portability, real-time gaming, and more based on FVM.
"We are excited to provide more pathways for building and accessing a distributed internet by using FVM on top of Brave's support for Filecoin and IPFS."* - Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave***
This is just the beginning. Web3 entrepreneurs now have the opportunity to unlock the trillion-dollar value potential of the open data economy, reimagining business models from Web2. Startups in the Filecoin and adjacent ecosystems have already raised over $200 million, and the Filecoin community is providing substantial support and funding plans for these teams—this includes the newly launched Web3 accelerator program and the upcoming bug bounty program (offering up to $500,000 rewards for white-hat hackers, with details to be announced soon).
Please stay tuned for in-depth blog posts related to these topics in the coming weeks.
Next Steps for the Filecoin Community After the Launch of FVM
The Filecoin ecosystem is excited to celebrate this important milestone with the entire community. We thank everyone who has contributed their time and effort to this open-source technology over the past few months.
"FVM is a major step forward for blockchain and Web3, enabling developers to create new applications and harness the immense potential of smart contracts for large-scale data."* - Juan Benet, Founder of Protocol Labs***
Please visit fvm.filecoin.io to learn more about the Filecoin Virtual Machine, its development roadmap, the ecosystem it focuses on, and how you can get involved.
