What is the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), and Why is it Groundbreaking for Filecoin?
The launch of Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was groundbreaking for Filecoin and open data economies.
Its launch marked a pivotal milestone in its mission to enable web-scale applications, bringing Web2-like infrastructure to the decentralized Web3 world.
Let’s dive into the Filecoin Virtual Machine and highlight its importance in being an entirely new set of use cases to the Web3 world.
What is the Filecoin Virtual Machine
The FVM was created to help push the ambition of Protocol Labs forward in building a truly decentralized internet.
In a nutshell, the FVM is an execution environment for smart contracts on the Filecoin Network, bringing programmability to the decentralized storage infrastructure and unleashing a new host of use cases.
To enable web-scale applications, both storage and programmability are needed. The storage part of the equation was already in full force through the decentralized peer-to-peer storage solution provided by Filecoin.
However, this was just one part of their overall vision.
The launch of FVM achieved the second part of the Filecoin vision by bringing general programmability to the Filecoin storage network, allowing developers to harness the potential of combining the power of smart contracts with verifiable storage.
As a result, the FVM is a significant advancement in the capabilities of decentralized storage as it elevates the sophistication of the Filecoin storage services, bringing a new era to Web3 internet applications and the open data economy.
The outstanding feature of the FVM is that it’s built on the same architecture as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). As a result, it helps new developers on Filecoin make rapid progress when deploying their solutions on the Filecoin ecosystem, as they can port existing EVM contracts to FVM without making any changes.
The FVM uses a WASM-based polyglot execution environment for IPLD data. In non-jargon terms, it allows developers to write smart contract code in their preferred programming language without learning something new — as long as it’s compliant with WebAssembly. This opens the doors to thousands of developers who were previously closed off to learning new languages like Solidity.
To further enhance usability, the FVM doesn’t directly interact with the data stored on the network nodes. Instead, it controls how the data is utilized, stored, edited, and maintained — bringing unlimited new use case potential to the ecosystem.
The launch of FVM is monumental to the open data economy, and it’s just a part of Filecoin’s larger roadmap as they aim to democratize the centralized cloud services of today into an open-access ecosystem.
Why is the FVM Groundbreaking?
Juan Benet, CEO and founder of Protocol Labs said: “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.”
With Filecoin aiming to convert cloud services into permissionless marketplaces, programmability was a vital piece of the missing puzzle in creating trustless data marketplaces. With the FVM launched, developers can create this ecosystem by building smart contracts.
As a result, the Filecoin community is viewing its ecosystem through an entirely new lens — taking the vision further beyond decentralized data storage.
Now, the FVM’s new features increase the utility and value of the Filecoin network as it opens up the data economy, with the critical arms benefiting from this being storage, computing, and content delivery. The programmability provides developers with the tools to implement new ways of how data is placed and monetized on open markets, allowing more participation in capturing and valuing data.
The avenues that the FVM opens up are endless. From DataDAOs to perpetual storage, DeFi applications to reputation systems — the FVM widens the landscape and creates infinite possibilities by allowing trustless marketplaces to be built.
In addition, it provides routes to reward individual contributions to the data economy that couldn’t previously be achieved. It also allows the onboarding and management of datasets to the decentralized cloud storage network to become autonomous.
Finally, the FVM also allows interoperability so developers can code smart contracts that interact with multiple blockchains.
Overall, we’re barely just scratching the surface of what is possible on Filecoin with the FVM as the internet becomes decentralized for the first time in history.
How is Filliquid using it?
FILLiquid is extremely proud of being a part of the overall Filecoin ecosystem.
The FVM opened the doors to allow us to build a trustless decentralized lending market.
We want to push the boundaries of storage expansion to help Filecoin achieve its mission of freeing the internet from centralization.
Our solution allows for continuous expansion of storage capacity for SPs by enabling them to borrow $FIL without additional financial burden.
It also allows $FIL token holders to earn interest on their idle assets without trusting a centralized authority.
Using the FVM, we seek to enhance the liquidity available to SPs and provide liquidity providers with the passive earnings they seek.
We’re making rapid progress on our solution, with the first phase of our Tesnet going live at the end of November. Join our Discord community to learn how to participate and earn rewards.
