Round 2 / Forest Archive

This Archive is important for anyone who values on-chain data that is older than 2000 epochs. This data is not just important for historical analysis, it's also a necessity for some dapps and other applications such as block explorers.

Most nodes on the Filecoin network do not store the entire chain state due to its size. Archival nodes are specially configured to maintain a more complete history of the chain state, however they are notoriously difficult and expensive to operate, which means very few exist and the few that do are under heavy load.

With this archive, the data is now freely available to anyone. Previously that data was primarily available out-of-band at a fee, costing as much has $3000-4000 USD to cover the bandwidth costs, per download! It also was previously more difficult to fetch only specific portions of the data.

Without the Archive, access to historical data would be significantly more difficult to obtain and likely expensive, reducing the decentralization of the Filecoin network and creating significant technical hurdles for some users.