Round 2 / filexp

Most interactions with the FVM and Filecoin state today require running a full node like Lotus, Venus, or Forest or leveraging someone else's full node via an RPC endpoint. Since running a full node requires more hardware than most users are willing to commit to a single application in practice this means relying on some RPC provider whether free or paid for both the availability and correctness of the RPC data. Additionally, data not easily accessible via the RPC APIs becomes effectively inaccessible to users.

FilExp provides tooling for both developers and end users to be able to easily ask questions, and get verifiable answers, about the Filecoin chain state without needing to run a full node. This is useful for regular use such as wanting to verifiably check an actors balance, convert an fX to a 0x address, perform an FEVM query, etc. Additionally, it helps with debugging by providing a smaller surface to probe network state than more full-featured software like Lotus. For example, it was used to debug issues some Filecoin tooling providers had in handling certain types of 0x addresses.