This Month in Forest - April 2025

[LesnyRumcajs]

This Month in Forest 🌲

Welcome to the April edition of This Month in Forest! We are excited to share the latest updates and improvements to the Forest Filecoin client (and more!).

Highlights

Filecoin Virtual Dev Summit in Toronto

convention n. [From Latin convenire "to come together."] An alibi; saturnalia; a gathering held at a safe distance from one's family; a place where normal behavioral conventions are suspended.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

Some of us will attend the Filecoin Virtual Dev Summit in Toronto, Canada. Come say hi! 👋 Maybe we'll have some swag for you? 😏

Teep and F3 landed!

The NV25 Teep upgrade landed, and just yesterday, the F3 activation on the mainnet was completed. 🎉 This is a significant milestone for the Filecoin network, and we are proud to have been part of it. 🚀

Read more on The F3 Journey.

Forest RPC benchmarks

benchmark v. trans. To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on competetive systems.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

We moved the RPC benchmarks to a separate repository, highlighting the client-agnostic nature of the benchmarks. You can find them here.

Curious about the RPC benchmarks? @AlexeyKrasnoperov gave a talk at Virtual Filecoin Dev Summit. Check it out 👇:

PDP Hackathon

The Forest team participated in the PDP hackathon! 💻 Lots of literal hacking involved, learning and fun. Check out one of our projects. I totally overengineered it, but I had a blast!

Want to know more about PDP? Check out the following articles and talks:

Articles:

• https://medium.com/@filoz/the-pdp-journey-a-refresher-on-proof-of-data-possession-and-its-path-to-mainnet-e6b481d9ad9a
• https://medium.com/@filoz/porep-pdp-proof-of-delivery-different-proofs-for-different-use-cases-e6daede195fb
• https://medium.com/@filoz/the-pdp-journey-an-in-depth-look-at-how-pdp-works-4b6079f4baad

Talks:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oD0J-4lIXg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mad2OqNMuQI

Development

Fast database migration

Were you tired of waiting for the database migration to finish after every Forest release, even though the schema didn't change? We were, too! 😴 We resolved it in this PR.

Improved syncing status

We completely revamped the syncing status reported by the forest-cli sync status and forest-cli sync wait commands. The new status is much more informative and user-friendly. ✨

❯ forest-cli sync status
Status: Synced (1 epochs behind)
Node Head: Epoch 2622745 ([bafy2bzaceddqydslgexg2wxi4frf3fbxnpammulf2zhy2bof3nu54h7ii7mgc, ...])
Network Head: Epoch 2622746
Last Update: 2025-04-30T10:26:00.743310194+00:00
Active Sync Tasks:
  - Fork Target: 2622746 ([bafy2bzaced4rcnm6czm2nclsqav5rdheitbybff53js5wssyed4kn7qpjm4vu, ...]), Stage: Validating Tipsets, Syncing Range: [2622746..2622746] (0 epochs)

RPC improvements and fixes

We added support for the final method, Filecoin.ChainGetEvents in the proposed Common Node API RPC method set! This was the cherry on top of the massive effort started a year ago.

fix n. & v. trans. [Latin figere "to attack with reproaches, to render immovable."] 1 n. A palliative shot in the system's arm, becoming less effective with each application 2 v. trans. To remove [a bug] by redefining the program specification in order to take advantage of an unexpected feature.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

We'll continue to monitor and improve them as needed. 🔨

Forest integration with Lotus Gateway

Want to have a proxy in front of your Forest node? Forest (almost) seamlessly integrates with the Lotus Gateway. Check out our guide on setting up this match made in heaven! 😍

Other

As always, see the CHANGELOG for details. Note that it contains primarily client-facing changes, so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details, you'll need to go through the commit history. 🤓