Round 1 / FVM

During the evaluated period in this RPGF-1 round, the FVM team has significantly contributed to the Filecoin ecosystem and tech stack, demonstrating our commitment and delivering tangible results.

This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Expanding the Filecoin developer community through strategic organization of hackathons, talks, and workshops, such as LabWeek'23, EthGlobal Istanbul, FIL Bangalore, EthIndia, Data Economy, Scaling Web3, EthLondon, ETHDenver, and more.
• Ensuring prompt and helpful developer support during events, as well as consistently on Slack.
• Collaborating with other teams to support the launch of AMM/DEXes on Filecoin mainnet.
• Delivering important features requested by ecosystem teams and developers, including: Eth API tracing, pluggable syscalls; as well as numerous improvements, cleanups, and fixes mainly in ref-fvm and Lotus.
• Landed various FVM-related FIPs in nv21: FIP-0071 (deterministic state access), FIP-0072 (event syscall API), FIP-0073 (remove beneficiary from self_destruct syscall), FIP-0075 (improvements to FVM randomness syscalls).
• Rapidly reviewing and addressing FVM-related security reports.
• Establishing FRC standards for data aggregators, programmatic deals, on-chain payment channels, etc., spearheading community discussion, and collaborating with key teams like Lighthouse and Spheron for adoption.
• Thoroughly analyzing FEVM painpoints reported by stakeholders (e.g. addressing), and proposing effective solutions (or lack thereof).
• Driving RaaS implementations, crafting RaaS documentation, and showcasing RaaS functionality on calibrationnet and mainnet.
• Reviewing and addressing changes in the Filecoin EVM to preserve compatibility with the Ethereum Dencun upgrade.
• Regularly updating developer tools and frameworks (e.g. Hardhat and Foundry templates) and enhancing documentation like the FVM Cookbook and docs.filecoin.io.
• Maintaining the filecoin-solidity library, a critical dependency of every Filecoin-specific FEVM application, evolving it from its initial PoC stage into a more robust, production-ready version used by most FIL apps.
• Diligently monitoring and publicly reporting metrics, including on-chain stats, DeFi metrics, programmatic storage deals.
• Working closely with the IPC team to enable the scalability framework to anchor onto the Filecoin L1 through Solidity smart contracts.

The merger of the FVM team at EngRes / PLGO with the IPC team in late Q4'23 has significantly amplified the joint impact, enabling IPC to play a key role in realizing step 3 of the Filecoin master vision: bringing services and compute to the vast amounts of data stored in the Filecoin network.

Thanks to IPC, teams working on distributed compute, indexing, reputation, ingestion, retrieval, etc. can now launch their own decentralized networks on Filecoin, backed by custom cryptoeconomics.

Key contributions of the joint FVM/IPC team include:

• Delivering the IPC M2.5 milestone (Fendermint client with CometBFT consensus, anchored on the Filecoin L1 through EVM smart contracts).
• Implementing essential features requested by the first L2 subnets (federated validation, ERC20 token supply networks, General Message Passing, atomic deposits from foreign L1s via Axelar).
• Closely collaborating with the first IPC-powered compute network, Fluence, to enable and support their launch on Filecoin mainnet on March 20, 2024.
• Attracting and engaging a new cohort of hackers interested in blockchain scaling via hackathons like ETHDenver, ETHOxford, EthGlobal London, and more.