Successful Launch of Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM)
The Filecoin community is celebrating the successful launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM). Since epoch 2,683,348 (or 15:14 UTC on March 14th), the Filecoin blockchain now supports smart contracts and programmable user functions through the FVM, unlocking enormous potential for the open data economy. This launch represents a milestone moment in Filecoin's plan to bring open access and public verifiability to three key areas of the data economy (storage, computation, and content delivery). Just as phones became "smart," the ability to write and install applications took these devices far beyond their pre-installed capabilities. Opening up creativity and control is how smartphones conquered the world. Similarly, FVM enables developers to control where, when, and how data is placed, managed, and monetized on open markets. The FVM launch triggers the final step in Filecoin's Masterplan, which aims to bring scalable computations and the ability to run web applications on the world's largest decentralized storage network. Moreover, the FVM launch firmly establishes Filecoin as a Layer-1 blockchain uniquely positioned to power the open data economy. Many leading web3 projects have announced plans to use, support, or integrate with FVM to upgrade their services.
FVM Opens Up Open Data Economy for Web3
FVM not only brings a resilient, accessible, and decentralized cloud closer but also creates opportunities for ownership and rewarding individual contributions to the data economy in previously unprecedented ways for thousands of developers, storage providers, entrepreneurs, and other network participants worldwide.
For example, Waterlily, an AI tool for generating images in artistic styles, uses tokens to directly reward the creator of original data in training artificial intelligence. Waterlily is one of over 150 teams that started deploying FVM-powered products and services on the Filecoin mainnet earlier today after experimenting, iterating, and hardening on testnets over the past few months. The ability to run FVM-powered DataDAOs, dApps, and more - many of which were previously impossible to build - has energized over 16,000 developers in the Filecoin ecosystem. FVM also brings the rest of web3 closer to the Filecoin ecosystem: The first runtime launched on FVM is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), familiar to many people. Many more virtual machine runtimes will come to FVM over time - the choice of EVM was a testament to the strong developer community and thriving tooling ecosystem built by our many friends in Ethereum. The entire Filecoin community looks forward to welcoming Ankr, Axelar, Brave, Celer, Ocean, Sushi, Tellor, and many other projects bringing new FVM-powered integrations.
FVM Unlocks Trillion-Dollar Market Opportunities
The products and services that can be developed with FVM represent opportunities for growth and capturing significant existing, nascent, or entirely new markets worth trillions of dollars. Ultimately, FVM and the Filecoin network could enable the development of applications, markets, and organizations that could surpass the scale and scope of services offered by centralized cloud providers and those running on them. Investors are excited about this potential and have allocated millions of dollars in capital to support ventures in the Filecoin ecosystem seeking to capitalize on these opportunities. For example, Longhash and Graph Paper Capital have already launched FVM-specific acceleration programs.
FVM also aims to create further growth opportunities for storage providers (SP) in the network, who contribute more than 13 EiB of storage capacity and make Filecoin the largest open access storage network on the planet. Since the launch, storage providers have secured hundreds of TiB of client data with more than 13,000 deals made in the FVM-powered market. The launch of FVM will create new ways for these storage providers to monetize their services and expand their offerings, ultimately driving growth in the open data economy.