This is a deprecated repo with historical relevance

This repo is where the original design of the Filecoin Virtual Machine was originally incubated.

The FVM shipped to Filecoin's mainnet in Network Version 16 (Skyr upgrade).

The final design of the FVM was formalized in FIP-0030, its activation was proposed in FIP-0031, and the new gas model was introduced in FIP-0032.

Today, most discussions and spec work take place in these venues:

• Early specification work, ideas, and design questions are discussed in the ref-fvm issue tracker. Technical design discussions and ideas can be found under these labels:
  • Kind: Discussion
  • Kind: Idea
• Formal protocol discussions involving the community at large take place in the Filecoin Improvement Proposals discussion forum.
• Formal technical proposals are submitted as Filecoin Improvement Proposals, and are subject to the governance process on their path to being scheduled for —and eventually released on— a network upgrade.

This is the home of the FVM project in Filecoin.

Contents

• Context and goals
• About this effort
• About this repo
• Document index
• Experiments
• License

See discussion in FIPs repo: filecoin-project/FIPs#113

Filecoin today lacks general programmability. As a result, it is not possible to deploy user-defined behaviour, or "smart contracts", to the blockchain.

The closest thing that Filecoin has is a discrete set of embedded smart contracts, denominated system "actors". They provide the logic for elements like storage power accounting, deal-making, payment channels, scheduled execution, and more. But their functionality is hardcoded as per the specs.

The goal of this project is to add general programmability to the Filecoin blockchain. We predict this will unleash a profileration of new services and tools that can be built and deployed to the Filecoin network, without requiring network upgrades, involvement from core implementation maintainers, changes in the embedded actors, or spec alterations.

Smart contracts on Filecoin can bring huge benefits to both clients and providers — from unlocking "repair providers" that automate the process of repeat storage deals for programmatic “fire and forget” storage, to on-chain storage onboarding contracts (a la programmatic Slingshot), to collective DataDAOs that fund/monetize data on Filecoin.

Furthermore, we aim for full EVM compatibility, allowing Filecoin to leverage the vast pool of assets, talent and tools that already exist in that ecosystem.

FVM (Filecoin Virtual Machine) is the name of this project, as well as the name of the execution environment for smart contracts on the Filecoin blockchain.

⚠️ These documents are being drafted.

• 00-introduction.md: summarizes vision, goals, assumptions, and requirements of this project.
• 01-architecture.md: details the proposed architecture.
• 02-state-of-the-art.md: analyses the state of the art concerning WASM+Blockchain, and concrete case studies of programmability in other blockchains.
• 03-impl-notes.md: notes on potential implementation.
• 04-evm-mapping.md: EVM compatibility proposals and notes.
• 05-use-cases.md: catalogue of brainstormed use cases the FVM should enable at some stage.
• 06-scalability-considerations.md: discusses the scalability considerations concerning state size, state churn, message/transaction throughput, etc.

• FVM Runtime Experiment

Dual-licensed: MIT, Apache Software License v2, by way of the Permissive License Stack.