As part of our ongoing efforts to foster an innovative community and expedite the advancements of Web3 technologies, Zondax joined the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) Foundry’s Early Builders Program to explore and build the tooling for FVM - AssemblyScript SDK.

Protocol Labs Researcher Raúl Kripalani first introduced the concept of Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) in 2021. Essentially, it was designed to support native Filecoin actors (smart contracts) in languages that compile to WASM and smart contracts written in foreign runtimes such as Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Secure EcmaScript (SES), and eBPF. In other words, FVM is a WASM-based execution environment for IPLD data being built into the blockchain, bringing the general programmability and EVM-compatible smart contracts to Filecoin.

The FVM Foundry is a long-term collective that brings together web3 devs with core developers from the FVM team to share knowledge, kickstart a Cambrian explosion of innovation on the Filecoin network and make sure that the FVM meets the technical requirements for the upcoming apps, systems and platforms that developers want to build on it.

Filecoin's goal for this pioneering program is to garner the collective efforts from Early Builder teams and develop a resilient, scalable and open FVM so that the goals of provable storage on smart contracts can be achieved.

Various teams have joined the program, and each focuses on different aspects of FVM, where teams shall exchange knowledge for tackling significant challenges such as pain points and bugs.

Recently, the FVM project has reached the Milestone 1.0 - "Mainnet will automically switch from the current legacy VMs to the WASM-based reference FVM. A new gas model will be activated that accounts for actual WASM execution costs. Only Rust built-in actors will be supported at this time. This milestone requires a network upgrade." And it is expected in September that the FVM will become user-programmable for the first time — FVM Milestone 2.

Zondax’s active participation in the Early Builder program is another excellent example of our expertise in building back-end tech solutions for leading projects in the cryptocurrency space.

Interested in knowing more about Zondax’s innovative blockchain services and discussing opportunities? Let’s connect today!