Filecoin Filecoin Virtual Machine - FVM, 1 Sep 2022

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From YouTube: FVM Technical Update with Maciej Witowski: FVM Engineering Manager

Description

Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) Engineering Manager Maciej talks through the current technical status of the FVM and outlines the next steps, including the timeline of releases and the features they will bring

Release Timeline:
👉 https://github.com/filecoin-project/ref-fvm/issues/692

Other ways to be involved:
✅ Follow & contribute to the design decisions being made on the FVM M2.1 release by subscribing to
⭐ FVM-specs: https://github.com/filecoin-project/fvm-specs
⭐ FIP's: https://github.com/filecoin-project/FIPs
⭐ https://github.com/filecoin-project/fvm-evm/

🌐 You can see our milestone goals on the website at https://www.fvm.filecoin.io

💖 Want to help build out the native Filecoin developer tools or infrastructure? RFPs are open: https://github.com/filecoin-project/devgrants/blob/master/rfps/fvm-open-tools-infra.md

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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.

The next major milestone will be the release of a fully EVM-compatible FVM in Q1 2023.

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

I'll head over to you matching.

B

Okay, uh thanks ellie, uh so hey everyone. My name is mate. I joined fvm team quite recently as engineering manager, uh so my role is to help the engineering team deliver our plans efficiently, avoiding delays, uh minimizing the risks etc, right uh so yeah.

B

Let me give you update on on where we are of our work, so we focus now on a milestone 2.1 of fvm, which will bring support for ethereum virtual machine, so people will be able to deploy, interact with ethereum smart contracts and just to so to put everyone on the same page, I'll I'll show you the we prepared the plan for incremental uh releases.

B

So let me show you, uh let me show you the screen to to show you this plan, uh so we have this table with with multiple releases and we so we split the work into tail milestones and these releases are named after minerals under the different degrees of most mineral hardness scale, uh so, which is which aligns nicely with the mental model of maturity and hardness increasing over time.

B

As we add more features, uh so each of these releases will be shipped to the wallaby test net that we set up for this, and we aim to have these releases roughly every week. uh So you, if you go to wallaby test and really uh repo you, you will be able to see the the updates with the with the releases right right, and this will be testing is also publicly available.

B

So you can already start deploying smart contracts and interact with them uh without setting up your local net right. So let's do an overview of the first release. So let me go to to wallaby testnet repo to also show you this so so. This is. This is the repo and we have an issue per each release. So the first release that we ship was called talk. uh It was shipped at 11 year 11 days ago, and it introduced a new evm actor which is capable of running even smart contracts.

B

But for now it is very simple support, so you can only run self-contained contracts which do not call other ethereum smart contracts or do not interact with any building actors.

B

uh So yeah here in the repo you can, you can find like simple, simple, uh simple coin: smart contract and you can also see how to how to test it uh and also jim posted that he he already prepared a tutorial uh that you can interact with this exact smart, smart contract. So thanks jim.

B

So this will be talk and, as you see in the table, this is the first release. Basic self-contained evm calls and our main focus at the moment is to wrap up the implementation of selenium, which is the which is this, which is the second release and we plan it to be ready on tuesday, 6th of september.

B

So basically, we said the day that every tuesday we'll try to have this next releases, so in selenium, we'll add support for ethereum, precompiles and also the self-destruct keyword, and we also made multiple performance improvements for the current smart contract interpreter.

B

So there will be selenium and then a week after selenium, we have another release, called copper uh which enables sending funds to existing, addresses and calling other ethereum smart contracts, and it will land on next tuesday after that. So that will be uh 13th of september right and after that, we're going to have iron, which is which adds this full support for ethereum json rpc, which is very crucial for seamless integrations with tools like metamask and the iron will be on, hopefully on tuesday, after like on next tuesday, which will be 20th of september right.

B

So that's the plan for for the next three weeks or so, and of course, with with next releases that you can find the table, uh there will be a bunch of other features like calling building actors or support for ethereum logs and adding like solidity, libraries for uh for building enacters and if we, so, if we zoom out like general plan, is to finish the engineering all on all of these releases till mid-november and afterwards, we'll start extensive testing period.

B

So this will be the first, uh the first network upgrade which brings programmability in the network. Therefore, we need to invest a lot in testing it, probably more than on any previous upgrade, and so our planning will be to use most probably on incentivized tests for this. So we are still figuring out the details, but we think that this, this testnet program will last around six weeks and, of course, we'd love to engage a community to deploy contracts on this test net and interact with the contract right so like.

B

If we look at that engineering, then testing this then other things in the world like christmas and chinese new year we are looking at the mainnet upgrade of february. uh That's that's the still the plan we are uh targeting.

B

um Do you have any questions and ali? Yes, this table is uh this table is public. I do it. Is I'm gonna, I'm gonna, send you a link to the issue which mentions that.

A

Awesome that would be great, I think, that'll be handy for people to uh end perfect. Thank you. uh Welcome, so, basically we're releasing on a rolling schedule and that'll match up with uh wallaby test net releases as well and incrementally um introduce new features to the evm compatible fvm.

A

Any questions from the audience, dragons raising his hand as well, so go ahead. Dragon.

C

Yeah, just like a thing that will follow this release plan obviously is like the discussions uh and febs that need to support like some of the changes we want to do so. Maybe a good point to share here is that over time we probably would introduce some additional fibs in the course of implementation and then like it would be super valuable to have feedback from the groups here. So it's it's like. We want to to keep everything in the open and share, and I'm so glad that much is here.

C

So we can like follow, updates and follow. Release plans know what's coming and also test that on wallaby, so this is kind of the the cycles of releases that we always wanted to have, and now this is spinning up. So just like, I, I think it's a great improvement.

C

It was a long time in the plans, but now it's actually happening. So I'm really happy and yeah. That's it.

B

Yeah absolutely like a lot like for a lot of these releases. We still need to get the designs right. So as you as.

A

You can see there will.

B

Be fibs and yeah. We look forward to collaborate with the community on these.