Filecoin Filecoin Virtual Machine - FVM, 1 Sep 2022

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: FVM Foundry Update: FEVM Actor Example with Fil-der Jim Pick

Description

About this video:
Jim Pick is an avid community builder (fil-der!) and teacher in the Filecoin Network.
Here he takes us through an early demo of SimpleCoin: an EVM-compatible FVM Actor (the term used for programmability / smart contracts in the Filecoin ecosystem).

Jim has built several demo's which you can play around with and are designed to give you an idea of how actors work.

This latest addition can be found on his “FVM Actor Code Playground” notebook on ObservableHQ. It has the latest Lotus with FVM pre-release (Talc) packaged into Docker images, which are used to spin up an on-demand ephemeral localnet (on Kubernetes/Knative). This variant of the notebook includes the “simplecoin” Solidity smart contract, which you can modify and compile to EVM bytecode using a simple web service. Then you can use it to create an actor, and invoke EVM methods against it.

🌐 https://observablehq.com/collection/@jimpick/filecoin-virtual-machine

============================================================
About FVM Foundry:
FVM Foundry is a program for early-builders on the Filecoin Vitrual Machine.
We are working collaboratively with our amazing open source community in order to explore and build valuable use cases, infrastructure, tooling, and docs for the native FVM.
The aim is to collaborate, exchange knowledge and innovate together as well as gather feedback and input in order to build the best development experience possible on the FVM.

Want to help shape the future of FVM?
🏗️ FVM tooling & Infrastructure open grant RFPs: https://github.com/filecoin-project/devgrants/blob/master/rfps/fvm-open-tools-infra.md

✅ Follow & contribute to the design decisions being made on the FVM by subscribing to the
⭐ FVM-specs: https://github.com/filecoin-project/fvm-specs
⭐ FIP's: https://github.com/filecoin-project/FIPs

💬 Interested in joining a future Foundry Cohort? Register your interest at https://fvm.filecoin.io/foundry

============================================================

About the FVM:

Currently Filecoin is known for being a decentralised storage and retrieval network, providing over 17 EiB of distributed data storage capacity to the world through thousands of Storage providers globally.

And we can think of this distributed storage network as being the layer zero of the Filecoin Architecture Network because ..
Storage is really only the start!

We want to be able to compute and analyse over and with the data on the Filecoin network!

And this is the goal of the FVM - to enable users to be able to deploy their own smart contracts (or actors as they are termed in the Filecoin ecosystem) and unlock the ability to perform on-chain computation over state data.

This additional layer of capability - which we can consider to be the layer 1 of the network - adds programmability to the already robust, permissionless storage network that is Filecoin.

Smart contracts + storage = FVM.

What will you build??

Links:
🌐 See more details on the website: https://fvm.filecoin.io
🦄 See the reference specification of FVM: https://github.com/filecoin-project/ref-fvm
👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Join the chat: #fvm on the Filecoin Slack Channel (visit filecoin.io to join)

A

Okay, so um so what I've implemented um if you've been familiar with, my previous demos, I have on this website, called observable hq and they allow you to host javascript notebooks and I've got a set of notebooks here with various what they do.

A

Is they all talk to a server I run and when you run the notebook it spins up on demand a local net with a bunch of docker images which spin up a um a couple of lotus nodes and the bootstrap uh uh version of uh filecoin from scratch running a branch with the fvm and evm support. So before I had the uh the first demo here, the hello world demo was using the native actors written in rust.

A

So this is a custom actor written in rust, which is quite verbose, but now that the latest version of lotus pre-release has evm support. So I wanted to do a version with a smart contract written in solidity.

A

So so, if you for the talk release, you can follow this issue here and you can see, there's an example, a smart contract in solidity and instructions on what you can do with it, with a very, very, very simple example, and so I'm going to show you that running in a web page here so the first time you go to this.

A

If nobody has been running it, it takes a little bit for the the docker images to spin up and start running um and once they're running um you can you have the smart contract here. You can modify it. If you want here, I can just modify it just so that you can see that something actually changed. So I changed the initial coin. Balance uh for this uh um erc style token is uh used to be thousand that's ten thousand one.

A

So I I'm going to click this button here in step two and it's going to send that code over to my server, so you just have to click it twice. I'm not sure why um and it compiles it. It's really quick! It's like under a second so um and what it does is it calls a little web web api and it sends bytes back, and this is actual bytes here.

A

If you expand that and then you can see here, it's actually spun up this uh docker images and you can see this height should be increasing, um so it went from 122 to 123, so that means blocks are being generated, um and so that that's good.

A

So I can just click on this button and it's just um as opposed to the um the native actors, which had had two steps where you had to install the actor code and then instantiate it with the evm actors, there's already a system actor with with the the virtual machine by code, so so at the command line you instead, you call lotus chain, create avm actor, so you can skip the install skip step and it just shoots the byte code across so I've copied the the json, rpc call and so I've.

A

This is essentially the equivalent to instantiating the actor with the native actors and you get your uh id address. So it's now on my local net and I can call it and um in the example um here they give you two weeks, two examples that you can do to confirm that it's working so so the first call is uh lowe's chain and vote evm actor. You give it the the address.

A

This is just sort of a hard-coded number, which I assume is the method on the instance and apparently this is the owner address. So if I invoke it, it's sent a message to the actor takes. You know 10 seconds, for it to be included in a block, so we have to wait for that um and there so it it executed it, and you can see the number come back so in in this one expects 20 27 10, but that's a hex number. So that's actually 10 000.

A

um the same as this line up here, except we added one to it. So so we can actually see that it's actually running our modified code, because this much and then you know we can try the non-owner one. um I mean I'm just guessing that it's calling uh the get balance uh method, but I don't really know um you know, but that's funny, so that one actually broke.

A

Okay, I I I think when I I clicked on here it actually, I have to load it again, anyways, um so that's what you can do with it. So what do I plan to do on with this one? Next, um obviously, there's going to be a new release coming out fairly soon, so I'll upgrade this to match up with the latest release. I'm also.

A

This is working against the local net. Now there's a new glyph api node coming up, so I'd like to have a little toggle somewhere, so you can choose between running against the local net or running against um the live test net, of course, to run across the test net. I'm going to need to enable people to have some funds in a wallet, so they can actually fund installing on the live test net.

A

So I'll have to make a little like a little faucet for that, so I've got lots of little things to tinker with, and I also want to experiment um with some of the native uh things like the polyphene sdk high level, sdk for rust actors and the activescript and the tinygo actors as well. So that's uh that's where I'm at right now.