Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) 100-day growth review and roadmap for the second half of the year

Original source: Filecoin Network

It's been 100 days since FVM's official launch, so read on to find out what happened after launch and how FVM will evolve over the rest of 2023.

100 days ago, on March 14, 2023, the Filecoin network launched the first programmable EVM runtime on the Filecoin Virtual Machine, which has since enabled the programmability of smart contracts (review the announcement article). This launch solidifies Filecoin's unique positioning as L1, powering the open data economy. Since then, the open ecosystem of developers, storage providers, storage users, and other network participants of Filecoin, the largest open access cloud service, has grown further. Come join us as we take a look at the remarkable progress FVM has made since its launch on Filecoin mainnet.

Filecoin Virtual Machine: Empowering the Filecoin Economy

When FVM launched, the community was encouraged by the prospect of moving most of the Filecoin economy on-chain. We hope FVM will accelerate key goals of the Filecoin Master Plan, some of these priorities include:

Ingest and manage datasets on the world's largest distributed cloud storage network, capable of over 12 million terabytes at cost-competitive prices. Today, 100 days after the launch of FVM, smart contracts are able to facilitate and aggregate storage transactions with full autonomy, helping storage users automatically find the best storage provider for their specific needs.

In addition, FVM allows the Filecoin community to build discovery and reputation services on the Filecoin blockchain and improve network transparency. A number of Filecoin block explorers are already using data pulled directly from the Filecoin blockchain to enrich dashboards and help guide decision-making, bringing greater trust and transparency to the Filecoin network (e.g. by validating smart contracts).

FVM also promises to facilitate staking and lending of FIL, Filecoin's native token used by storage providers to pledge, grow, and secure the network. In the beginning, many well-known cryptocurrency exchanges quickly implemented support for FVM wallet address compatibility**(f 4)** so that Filecoin network participants can not only interact with new FVM dApps, but also with Metamask Wait for familiar tool interaction. Specifically, over 82,000 unique wallets have interacted with FVM so far since its launch. Additionally, DeFi services on the Filecoin network are currently seeing the fastest growth (+140%)** in the Top 100 of all blockchains, as measured by Total Value Locked (TVL) growth, and are currently offered in several Among them reached nearly 4.5 million FIL.

At launch, community members hope that FVM will leverage Filecoin and FVM's capabilities (such as data storage) to enhance the functionality of products and services emerging from other web3 communities. About three months after launching FVM, multiple integrations with bridges like Axelar and Celer and over 35 other key partners bring Filecoin closer to the rest of web3, enabling richness between Filecoin and the rest of the web3 ecosystem exchange of messages and transactions.

Many unique smart contracts and dApps (over 1200 in total) have launched on FVM, but the user base for many of these applications is still relatively rudimentary. In the coming weeks and months, the goal of the Filecoin community is to continue to accelerate FVM development.

dApps that unlock utility for end users

These new possibilities unleashed by FVM have spawned a frenzy of developer and entrepreneurial activity in both existing and new communities. As of this writing, over 1100 unique smart contracts have been deployed to dApps on the Filecoin network, and over 80,000 wallets have been created and started interacting with these FVM powered dApps . The total balance of our FVM accounts and contracts has exceeded 2.8 million FIL.

FVM is fully compatible with the EVM running on top of the Ethereum blockchain, which helps new Filecoin developers deploy solutions on the Filecoin blockchain. As a result, community interest in hackathons continues to soar. Specifically, we held two FVM-focused hackathons, Space Warp (before FVM release) and HackFS, which attracted over 1700 developers. In addition, all open program slots in two dedicated FVM accelerator programs are fully utilized, with these teams building products and services at the leading edge of this new technology.

There are also many notable distributed applications that have launched on FVM and span multiple categories. While the Filecoin Ecosystem Directory is currently undergoing a revamp, it will soon become the best place for community members to add or browse the growing list of products and services on Filecoin. But there are currently only some excellent web3 projects that are being built or have integrated FVM.

Infrastructure Tools

• Shoulders
• Celery
• Tellor
• Filfox
• Starboard
• Berykh
• Metamask
• Brave
• Squid Router
• Kraken

Storage and Cloud Services

• Spheron
• Lighthouse
• Saturn
• Cod

Education, Science and Public Goods

• Lagrange DAO
• Shale Protocol

Media and Entertainment

• Waterlily
• Trustified
• Filemarket
• NFT Forever
• Resolution

Filecoin Staking

• Glyph
• DAO Collective
• stFIL
• SFT Protocol
• Filet Finance
• HashMix
• NodeDAO
• FilFi

The road ahead: Filecoin will shape the open data economy

Over the past quarter, we have focused on securing key partnerships and removing barriers. As the second half of 2023 approaches, we want to prioritize the users of **FVM dApps as well as the developer experience using FVM. **

We plan to focus on small storage transactions and drive Filecoin and FVM to democratize storage. This will allow dApps and DAOs to be built around data uploaded by individual users. They can create unique incentives to replicate, update, and fix storage transactions on top of this democratized standard. We are working with aggregators on Filecoin and making them native to FVM - so builders can upload small pieces of data through their dApps and smart contracts.

We are also building a distributed aggregation standard that allows anyone to create "data drop boxes" for FVM. We hope this enables true trustless aggregation on Filecoin, all managed on-chain via FVM. dApps and DAOs can be built on top of this standard so that new data can be uploaded and storage transactions can be updated, replicated and repaired via a distributed aggregation standard.

For the future, what do we expect to unlock? There are a lot of cool platforms on FVM: **distributed computing, data marketplaces, and DAOs built with LLM and generative AI. **We want the team to create a marketplace for arbitrary computational work, especially model training and inference based on data stored on Filecoin. We predict strong markets for IPNI dispute resolution, data preparers, and REC tokenization. We anticipate that LLMs will play a central role in open source generative AI models, all of which are Data DAOs built on top of FVM (learn more here). With data, AI, and compute, the future looks bright for FVM!

Finally, we're going the extra mile to make FVM easy to use. We want the process of uploading funds, data, and smart contracts onto FVM to be effortless. We are working with close partners - wallets, exchanges and browsers, and hope these launches will be meaningful for builders. If you also want to build in this field, please contact us!

Check out the latest Filecoin and IPFS Ecosystem Roundup for a comprehensive look at ecosystem developments, plus additional insights and commentary.

Keep in sync with FVM

As mentioned above, it's never too late to build with FVM! If you'd like to participate in an upcoming hackathon, check out the Filecoin Ecosystem Hackathon homepage. If your project reaches the accelerator stage, please check out Softnoise from Protocol Labs, which will help you find the most suitable accelerator. If you want more FVM resources, check out the FVM linktree.