This Month in Forest - June 2025

[AlexeyKrasnoperov]

This Month in Forest 🌲

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

Highlights

• 🧠 The preliminary design for F3 snapshots is complete! The FRC is ready for review.
• 🤝 The Common Node API FRC has been merged, aligning JSON-RPC behavior across implementations and simplifying ecosystem tooling integration.
• 🦉 Forest v0.27.0 – Whisperer in the Darkness was released! Check out the release notes.
• ☀️ Forest goes off-grid! @joshdougall showcased a solar-powered, portable Filecoin node, running Forest wherever he travels. First presented at the FIL Dev Summit in Toronto, the setup highlights Forest's lightweight design and resource efficiency.

Development

📦 RPC and State Caching

• Forest now uses dedicated caches for receipts and events in the RPC layer, significantly improving performance for StateWaitMsg and StateGetReceipt RPC Methods.

⚡️ Power Table Optimization

• Introduced a blockstore read cache that drastically improves the performance of F3.GetPowerTable, reducing execution time from ~1.7s to ~0.7s with high cache hit rates and low memory footprint.

☁️ Archive Automation

• A new forest-tool archive sync-bucket command automates snapshot generation and uploading to S3, keeping Forest's archival snapshot buckets up-to-date and reproducible.

🔍 CLI Enhancements

• Forest CLI gains parity with Lotus: the new forest-cli chain list command allows developers and operators to inspect tipsets, gas usage, and messages across epochs with detailed gas stats.

🧬 Decoding Actor Params

• Forest adds a proof-of-concept implementation for the Filecoin.StateDecodeParams API. Currently supported:
  • Miner: Constructor, ChangeWorkerAddress
  • Account (v11–v16): Constructor, AuthenticateMessageExported
  • EVM (v15–v16): Constructor
• This lays the groundwork for more granular and decoded state insights via RPC.

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. 🤓