Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) Launch 100-Day Growth Review and Second Half Roadmap

Original source: Filecoin Network

It has been 100 days since the official release of FVM. Reading the following can help you understand everything after the release and how FVM will develop for the remainder of 2023.

100 days ago, on March 14, 2023, the Filecoin network launched the first programmable EVM runtime on the Filecoin Virtual Machine, thus gaining smart contract programmability (revisit the announcement article). This release solidified Filecoin's unique positioning as L1, powering the open data economy. Since then, an open ecosystem composed of developers, storage providers, storage users, and other network participants of Filecoin's maximum open access cloud services has further developed and grown. Let's take a look at the significant progress FVM has made since its launch on the Filecoin mainnet.

Filecoin Virtual Machine: Empowering the Filecoin Economy

When FVM launched, the prospect of moving most of the activities of the Filecoin economy on-chain greatly encouraged the community. We hope that FVM can accelerate the achievement of key goals outlined in Filecoin's overall plan, some of which include:

Managing and onboarding datasets on the world's largest distributed cloud storage network (capable of providing over 12 million TB of capacity at competitive prices). Today, 100 days after the launch of FVM, smart contracts can autonomously facilitate and aggregate storage transactions, helping storage users automatically find the best storage providers that meet their specific needs.

Additionally, FVM allows the Filecoin community to build discovery and reputation services on the Filecoin blockchain, enhancing network transparency. Many Filecoin block explorers have begun to enrich their dashboards with data extracted directly from the Filecoin blockchain, helping guide decision-making and bringing greater trust and transparency to the Filecoin network (for example, by verifying smart contracts).

FVM also promises to facilitate the staking and lending of FIL, the native token of Filecoin, which is used by storage providers to pledge, grow, and secure the network. Initially, many well-known cryptocurrency exchanges quickly implemented support for FVM wallet address compatibility (f4), allowing Filecoin network participants to interact not only with new FVM dApps but also with familiar tools like Metamask. Specifically, to date, over 82,000 unique wallets have interacted with FVM since its launch. Furthermore, measured by the growth of Total Value Locked (TVL), DeFi services on the Filecoin network are currently the fastest-growing among the top 100 blockchains (+140%), reaching nearly 4.5 million FIL among several providers.

At the time of the release, community members hoped that FVM could leverage the capabilities of Filecoin and FVM (such as data storage) to enhance the functionality of products and services emerging in other web3 communities. About three months after the launch of FVM, multiple integrations with bridges like Axelar and Celer, as well as over 35 other key partners, have brought Filecoin closer to the rest of web3, enabling rich messaging and transaction exchanges between Filecoin and other web3 ecosystems.

Many unique smart contracts and dApps (over 1,200 in total) have been launched on FVM, but many of these applications still have relatively nascent user bases. In the coming weeks and months, the Filecoin community aims to continue accelerating the development of FVM.

Unlocking Utility for End Users with dApps

The new possibilities unleashed by FVM have sparked a frenzy of activity among developers and entrepreneurs in both existing and new communities. As of this writing, over 1,100 unique smart contracts have been deployed to dApps on the Filecoin network, with over 80,000 wallets created and beginning to interact with these FVM-driven dApps. The total balance of our FVM accounts and contracts has exceeded 2.8 million FIL.

FVM is fully compatible with the EVM running on the Ethereum blockchain, which helps new Filecoin developers deploy solutions on the Filecoin blockchain. As a result, community interest in hackathons has continued to soar. Specifically, we hosted two FVM-focused hackathons, Space Warp (before the FVM launch) and HackFS, attracting over 1,700 developers. Additionally, all open project slots for two dedicated FVM accelerator programs have been fully utilized, with teams building products and services at the forefront of this new technology.

Many noteworthy decentralized applications have already been launched on FVM, spanning multiple categories. While the Filecoin ecosystem directory is currently being revamped, it will soon become the best place for community members to add or browse the growing list of products and services on Filecoin. However, only a portion of the excellent web3 projects that are currently building or have already integrated FVM are listed here.

Infrastructure Tools

• Axelar
• Celer
• Tellor
• Filfox
• Starboard
• Beryx
• Metamask
• Brave
• Squid Router
• Kraken

Storage and Cloud Services

• Spheron
• Lighthouse
• Saturn
• Bacalhau

Education, Science, and Public Goods

• Lagrange DAO
• Shale Protocol

Media and Entertainment

• Waterlily
• Trustified
• Filemarket
• NFT Forever
• Resolutio
• Filecoin Staking
• Glif
• Collectif DAO
• stFIL
• SFT Protocol
• Filet Finance
• HashMix
• NodeDAO
• FilFi

The Road Ahead: Filecoin Will Shape the Open Data Economy

In the past quarter, we have focused on securing key partnerships and removing barriers. As we enter the second half of 2023, we hope to prioritize the user experience of FVM dApps and the developers using FVM.

We plan to focus on small storage transactions, driving the democratization of storage through Filecoin and FVM. This will allow dApps and DAOs to be built around data uploaded by individual users. They can create unique incentive mechanisms to replicate, update, and repair storage transactions on this democratized standard. We are collaborating with aggregators on Filecoin to make them native to FVM—so builders can upload small data segments through their dApps and smart contracts.

We are also building a distributed aggregation standard that allows anyone to create a "data drop box" for FVM. We hope this can achieve true trustless aggregation on Filecoin, all managed on-chain through FVM. dApps and DAOs can be built on this standard to upload new data and can update, replicate, and repair storage transactions through the distributed aggregation standard.

What are we looking forward to unlocking in the future? There are many exciting platforms on FVM: distributed computing, data markets, and DAOs built with LLM and generative AI. We hope teams will create a marketplace for arbitrary computational tasks, especially for model training and inference based on data stored on Filecoin. We anticipate that markets for IPNI dispute resolution, data preparers, and REC tokenization will be strong. We expect LLMs to play a central role in open-source generative AI models, all built on data DAOs on top of FVM (learn more here). With data, AI, and computation, the future is bright for FVM!

Finally, we are doubling down on ensuring that FVM is easy to use. We want the process of uploading funds, data, and smart contracts to FVM to be effortless. We are collaborating with close partners—wallets, exchanges, and browsers—to ensure these launches make sense for builders. If you also want to build in this space, please reach out to us!

Check out the latest overview of the Filecoin and IPFS ecosystem for a comprehensive understanding of ecosystem developments, along with more insights and commentary.

Stay Updated with FVM

As mentioned above, it is never too late to build with FVM! If you wish to participate in upcoming hackathons, please check the Filecoin Ecosystem Hackathon homepage. If your project is at the accelerator stage, please check Protocol Labs' Softnoise, which will assist you in finding the most suitable accelerator. If you want more FVM resources, please check the FVM linktree.