Round 2 / Forest

Forest is critical to serve the needs of the node operators which make up the Filecoin network and to support the development of the core protocol.

Historically node operators have been mostly limited to using Lotus, which is a critical piece of infrastructure that bares a huge burden of servicing all types of operators. Forest provides an alternative, which can be more agile and focused on serving specialized needs within the ecosystem.

The process of building alternative implementations is itself hugely valuable for the ecosystem. Building interoperable software demands good specifications and well defined interfaces. In the Filecoin ecosystem Forest has helped to improve the quality of specifications, identify both theoretical and practical bugs and vulnerabilities, and selfishly ensure good engineering practices for productive collaboration are prioritized.

Forest usage is growing, and the user base is expected to flourish in 2025. Today Forest powers the snapshot service ChainSafe operates which is utilized by a majority of node operators. The integration of Forest and Curio is steadily progressing is expected to be ready for public testing by the end of this year. As the Forest's RPC API nears completion and begins to be optimized and hardened many potential use cases are being unlocked.

Did we mention that Forest is the only Filecoin implementation written in the Rust programming language, our lord and saviour!?!? 🦀🦀🦀