Filecoin v17 Shark Network Upgrade

The next Filecoin mandatory network upgrade is v17, and codenamed Shark is expected at epoch 2383680, on Nov 30th on 2022-11-30T14:00:00 Z. All node operators, including storage providers, must upgrade to this release before that time. Storage providers must update their daemons, miners, market and worker(s)/boost.

The Filecoin Virtual Machine is being introduced incrementally. This minimizes the risk of disruption to the network, and gives developers plenty of opportunities to engage early on. Hence, this upgrade delivers a wave of protocol refinements that will allow for useful smart contracts to be written using the FVM (eg. programmable markets, lending contracts, etc.). It includes consensus-breaking changes and a couple of necessary improvements for the Network.

⚠️ We suggest upgrading your nodes to this version as soon as possible, all node operators must be on lotus v1.18.0 & ^ for this upgrade.! ⚠️

You can check the release note with the details of the upgrade here (Github)

What is new about it:

Beneficiary Address for Storage Providers: currently only the owner address can withdraw the funds from the miner actor. A new role beneficiary is proposed for a storage provider, which takes over the financial control from the owner. This will provide more flexibilities for the Filecoin finance market.

Fix PreCommit Deposit Independent of Sector Content: This proposal sets the pre-commit deposit to a value independent of sector content: the estimated storage pledge of a sector with space-time that is exactly filled by verified deals. This breaks coupling between storage power mechanics and the built-in (privileged) storage market actor, which is necessary as a prerequisite to a larger re-architecture supporting alternative deal markets on the FVM. It also presents an opportunity to reduce deal-related gas costs.

Forward Compatibility for PreCommit: Introduces new versions of PreCommitBatch and ProveReplicaUpdates methods, since in the near future Filecoin expects a change in storage market mechanisms to recognise UnsealedSectorCID as primary identifier of data. Adding these new versions of the methods ​​will allow  more straightforward upgrades in the future.

Standard Message Authentication: Today, the only kind of actors that can "authenticate" a piece of data are account actors. This FIP proposes adding an Authenticate method that any actor can choose to implement. This method can be called by any other actor to verify the authenticity of a piece of data.

Decoupling Fil+ from Marketplace: Represents Filecoin Plus DataCap allocations separately from the built-in market actor. Adds explicit term (duration) limits to DataCap allocations. Simplifies the quality-adjusted power calculation to remove power spreading out over a sector's lifetime. Supports extending the terms of DataCap allocations independently of market storage deals. Represents DataCap as a fungible token. These changes provide a foundation for user-programmed market actors to broker Filecoin Plus verified deals in the future.

At Zondax we develop and maintain the Rosetta integration for Protocol Lab's Filecoin project, tailored specially to the use cases of exchanges, with focus on:

• Blocks indexing and in-depth transactions inspection

• Getting accounts information such as balances and vesting schedules

• Network status inspection tools

• Transactions creation and signing tools

Filecoin signing tools - wallet tools

Many well known wallets in the Filecoin ecosystem depend on Zondax’s libraries to interact with the network. Zondax filecoin-signing-tools covers the signing process, to be used as a Rust or WASM library, and also to be used along with JSONRPC.Dockerized Filecoin Node. We have also worked on a dockerized Filecoin node, that is  ready to be used for playing on a devnet or running a test node connected to mainnet/testnet.You can find more information in the following links:

• Shark: Release v1.18.0

• Filecoin Virtual Machine - Implementation Roadmap

• Atomic switch to non-programmable FVM

• Lotus releases (Github)