Open Discussion on dApp development with FVM

[trruckerfling]

Simple Summary:

At the recent Fil Dev Summit Singapore (FDS), the FVM team ran a FVM app & tooling track to open up the discussion around FVM's existing features, current & future roadmap and user feedback/ideas. The track covered 3 main categories:

• Programmatic Storage
• DeFi & dApp development
• Protocol-level design

Each category had a dedicated discussion to it where FVM team, Filecoin core devs, partners and community builders participated. This article is part of a series of discussions that highlight takeaways from the event, to continue and open up the conversation online. You can easily navigate to other discussions in the hyperlinks above.

Motivation and ask from community:

FVM builders and partners, including Filecoin devs are invited to participate in these discussions, below in thread ⬇️ and give direct feedback to FVM product and engineering teams, to build a valuable VM. These discussions are meant to be ongoing, from FDS Singapore to Iceland and beyond.

dApp development with FVM discussion:

The dApp ecosystem discussion revealed pain points to be resolved, to enable dApp development that develops dApps that can go to market. These include:

1. dApp transaction speeds taking too long (60-90s as compared to split seconds that are available on most successful dApps with great UX).

This is due to 30s block times on Filecoin, which is a protocol-level change and has ongoing discussions for. Finality is also affected by block times as Filecoin confirms finality at 900 epochs (~7.5 hours), which is a blocker for cross-chain messaging and the ability to export Filecoin's data services. IPC is currently working on Granite Consensus which will achieve fast finality for Filecoin.

2. Gas fees are high for dApp transactions.

Technically Filecoin's gas fees are one of the lowest. Enabling gasless transactions via account abstraction (AA) can unlock solutions for these (e.g. dApp admin taking on gas costs for gasless txns to users). FVM is currently designing AA, which will be different than Ethereum's recently launched AA. We expect this before Q2 next year.

3. Builders are requesting to enable historical data queries of the chain.

The update is that we are working closely with partners and are close to integrating TheGraph onto Filecoin mainnet, via FVM. After which, there are plans to provision subgraphs for the community too.

4. Builder feedback is that the UX is not good for Filecoin address types (f1,f2,f3,f4) and is a huge blocker onboarding new users.

There is currently Filecoin documentation to address the different types and how to use them. Although, the team recognizes that a more streamlined UX where any address is automatically converted, is still highly needed. The current fix discussed is to standardize that all FVM tooling automatically converts address types.