ChainSafe is excited to announce that we were awarded a grant by Protocol Labs to build an additional implementation of Filecoin in Rust. We are thrilled to be contributing to the Filecoin ecosystem and grateful to be working so closely with Protocol Labs!

What is Filecoin?

Filecoin is an open-source blockchain-based decentralized storage network that has a native cryptocurrency. When mainnet launches in a few months, it will be an open service where participants in the network earn Filecoin tokens for providing data storage and retrieval services. Built into the Filecoin protocol is a decentralized algorithmic market to connect buyers and sellers of data storage & retrieval services; creating an efficient market where one did not previously exist.

Why are we building an additional implementation?

There are currently two implementations of Filecoin in Golang: go-filecoin & lotus. However, it is important for the Filecoin ecosystem to have multiple implementations, ideally in different languages, to make the network more robust and secure. In this way, our Rust implementation will contribute to the security of the Filecoin network.

What exactly are we building?

Filecoin is comprised of many different systems, including but not limited to: a blockchain, a virtual machine, a storage mining, markets, and a (libp2p) node system. See this section of the Filecoin specification for details on these various systems. Our implementation will take a modular approach to building a full Filecoin node in two parts — (i) building Filecoin’s security critical systems in Rust from the Filecoin specification (including the virtual machine, blockchain, and node system), and (ii) integrating functional components for storage mining and storage & retrieval markets to compose a fully functional Filecoin node implementation.

We have been actively developing our implementation, Forest, for a couple of months now. Check out our repo on Github and join our Discord if you’re interested in contributing or learning more. We will be posting updates as we progress: stay up to date by following us on Medium and Twitter.