The Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) Has Arrived, Bringing Smart Contracts to Filecoin

Today, the Filecoin community is proud to announce the successful launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM).

As of epoch 2,683,348 (or 3.14PM UTC on March 14), the Filecoin blockchain now supports smart contracts and user programmability via the Filecoin Virtual Machine, unlocking the enormous potential of an open data economy.

This launch is a landmark milestone in Filecoin’s larger roadmap, which aims to bring open access and public verifiability to the three key arms of the data economy (storage, compute, and content-delivery).

When phones became “smart”, the ability to write and install apps catapulted these devices far beyond their pre-installed capabilities. Opening up creativity and control is how smartphones came to rule the world.

Likewise, FVM allows developers to orchestrate where, when, and how data gets placed, governed, and monetized on open markets.

The launch of FVM kicks off the final step in the Filecoin Masterplan, which aims to bring large-scale computation and the ability to power web-scale apps to the world’s largest decentralized storage network.

Additionally, the launch of FVM solidifies Filecoin’s position as the Layer-1 blockchain uniquely poised to power an open data economy. Many leading web3 projects have announced plans to use, support, or integrate with FVM to upgrade their services.

Unlocking the Open Data Economy for Web3

The FVM not only brings closer a more resilient, accessible, and decentralized cloud, but also opportunities to own and reward individual contributions to the data economy in previously unimaginable ways for the many thousands of developers, storage providers, entrepreneurs and other network participants from all over the world.

For example, Waterlily, a prompt-based AI tool that generates images in the style of specific artists, uses tokens to directly reward the creator of the original AI training data.

Waterlily is one of over 150 teams which began deploying FVM-powered products and services to the Filecoin mainnet earlier today after experimenting, iterating, and hardening on testnets over the past few months.

The ability to launch FVM-powered DataDAOs, dApps, and more – many of which were impossible to build before – has energized the 16,000+ developers in the Filecoin ecosystem.

The FVM also brings the rest of web3 closer to the Filecoin ecosystem: The first runtime to launch on the FVM is the familiar-to-many Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

While many other VM runtimes will come to FVM over time - choosing EVM first was a testament to the strong developer community and thriving tooling ecosystem that has been built by our many friends in Ethereum.

The whole Filecoin community is thrilled to welcome Ankr, Axelar, Brave, Celer, Ocean, Sushi, Tellor and many other projects, who are bringing new FVM-enabled integrations.

“We’re thrilled to integrate with FVM and leverage its powerful smart contract capabilities to enhance the user experience on Sushiswap. With FVM, we can unlock new frontiers for decentralized finance and offer our users even more innovative and efficient solutions. We’re excited to continue collaborating with the Filecoin team and building the future of Web3 together.”

- Jared Grey, CEO of Sushi

The products and services that can be developed with the FVM represent opportunities to grow and capture sizable existing, nascent, or entirely new markets worth trillions of dollars.

Ultimately, the FVM and Filecoin network could enable the development of applications, markets, and organizations that may eclipse the scale and breadth of services offered by centralized cloud providers and those running on top.

Investors are excited about this potential and have earmarked millions of dollars in capital to help incubate businesses in the Filecoin ecosystem that seek to capitalize on these opportunities.

For example, Longhash and Graph Paper Capital have already launched FVM-specific accelerator programs.

The FVM also aims to unlock more growth opportunities for Storage Providers (SPs) on the network, who contribute over 13 EiB of storage capacity and make Filecoin the largest open access storage network on the planet.

Since launch, storage providers have secured hundreds of TiB of clients data with more than 130M FIL locked as collateral, while continuously earning block rewards and income from storage deals.

Following the launch of FVM, decentralized financial services built by developers may make it easier for FIL, an essential component of the Filecoin storage network, to be leased by tokenholders to storage providers to facilitate increasing storage capacity and usage.

In total, third party developers (such as Glif, FILL Pool, Filet Finance, etc.) are planning to make more than 5M FIL available via DeFi services to Storage Providers via pilot programs in the next few months.

Key players in web3 and beyond are using the FVM for lending, perpetual storage, cross-chain, identity, and more.

FVM is revolutionizing the way we interact with the web3 ecosystem and igniting new solutions from note-worthy web3 projects ranging from FVM powered leasing services to perpetual storage solutions to developer tooling, DeFi, cross-chain solutions, and more. Let’s dive in.

DeFi Lending Protocols

FVM allows developers to build new solutions to help Storage Providers access FIL for collateral. Specifically, FIL token holders will soon be able to contribute their own FIL to grow Storage Provider operations via smart-contract based protocols.

These third party protocols will have their own sets of criteria for selecting Storage Providers to lease FIL to, and take different approaches to lease terms and requirements.

The ability to more efficiently connect Filecoin token holders with Storage Providers could accelerate the network’s data growth and enable new Storage Providers to bring their services online more efficiently.

Perpetual Storage and Data DAOs

Before the FVM launch, storage deals weren’t perpetual and had to be renewed every 1.5 years. Now, the FVM allows users to store once and have repair and replication bots manage repetitive storage deal creation tasks.

Using a smart contract, users can provision a wallet with a FIL endowment to fund data storage permanently - across many storage providers over time.

This gives users the long-term storage permanence that other blockchains claim while also benefiting from Filecoin’s verifiable storage proofs, with mathematical proofs to ensure that the network stores and replicates the data correctly.

Data DAOs can also leverage perpetual storage by using a FVM actor to coordinate and govern the upload of data to the DAO; they can ensure certain standards are met for a scalable and clean dataset.

A FVM actor could also be used to mint tokens and NFTs for participating members of the DAO to reward participation and incentivize ideal behavior.

Combining perpetual storage and Data DAOs enables infinite creative possibilities for decentralized data management, payments, and stewardship.

Ocean, NFT.Storage, and Waterlily are just a few of these Data DAOs using FVM to transform communally-governed storage.

Cross-Chain Solutions

The Filecoin Virtual Machine enables integrations with leading web3 chains like Polygon, Ethereum, and more for cross-chain messaging, and liquidity via Celer, Axelar, and more. This will enable users to add powerful data capabilities to any chain.

For example, users of dApps on other chains can easily access and pay for Filecoin services like verifiable data storage and decentralized compute via smart contract calls, and bring existing liquidity in the form of wrapped tokens.

“The Axelar-Filecoin integration is one of the first use-cases of interoperability that enables composition of chains with different properties. For instance, DeFi across blockchains will be composable with decentralized storage, regardless of where they choose to build.”

- Sergey Gorbunov, co-founder of Axelar

The FVM will enable third party decentralized financial applications to support data storage businesses with on-chain and off-chain flows of value in FIL, and other tokens as well as fiat currencies.

With FVM, there are new ways to transact Filecoin via wallets like Metamask and Glif, plus support on major exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and more.

You can now swap FIL natively on-chain for other assets including bridged ETH, BTC and stables, allowing for native on-chain asset management strategies.

Users can also find the lowest fee routes and develop insurance and hedging strategies using cross-chain decentralized exchanges (e.g., Squid) as well as a variety of Automated Market Makers (e.g., SushiSwap) and derivatives (e.g., Thetanauts).

DeSci, Video, Gaming, & More!

Smart contracts combined with content-addressed and verifiably persistent storage, create boundless possibilities for decentralized data management, payments, and stewardship.

The FVM launch will unlock new paradigms for FVM-powered services for video creator communities and livestream storage (e.g., Livepeer), social data preservation and portability, real-time gaming, and many more.

“We are excited to build upon Brave’s existing support for Filecoin and IPFS with the launch of FVM, offering more ways to build and interact with the decentralized Web”.

• Brian Bondy, co-founder and CTO at Brave

This is just the beginning. Web3 entrepreneurs now have the opportunity to unleash the potential of a trillion dollar open data economy and reinvent Web2’s centralized business models. Startups in the Filecoin and adjacent ecosystems have raised over $200M in funding.

The community offers ample support and funding structures for teams, including new web3 accelerators and an upcoming bug bounty program rewarding white-hat hackers with up to $500k (details to be announced soon).

Deep dive blog posts on each of these topics will be published in the coming weeks – stay tuned!

FVM Launch and What’s Next for the Filecoin Community

The Filecoin ecosystem is excited to celebrate this important milestone with the entire community. We thank all those who have dedicated their time and energy over the past months to the development of this open source technology.

“FVM is a major step forward for blockchains and Web3 — it enables developers to build new kinds of applications, bringing the powers of smart contracts to large scale data.”

-Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs

Please visit fvm.filecoin.io to learn more about the Filecoin Virtual Machine, its development roadmap, the ecosystem that is emerging around it, and how you can be a part of it.