Announcing Watermelon nv21 Upgrade - Extended Sector Commitments, Synthetic PoRep, FVM Enhancements, and more

The arrival of the nv21 Network Upgrade on mainnet is here! This upgrade codenamed ‘Watermelon’ lands Tuesday, December 12.

This upgrade brings a wave of enhancements and new features aimed at bolstering the network’s efficiency and robustness.

What the upgrade means for the Filecoin network:

Extending the maximum sector commitment to 3.5 years. This change will allow Storage Providers to offer more extended-term deals, significantly reducing sector renewal frequency. Clients would also be able to make deals up to 3.5 years as well.
Introducing Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) fixes and enhancements and overall improvements.
The implementation of ‘deterministic state access’ will ensure that the state tree is consistent and reachable across different implementations of Filecoin.
Introduction of synthetic Proof of Replication (PoRep), marking a leap forward in data replication efficiency. This will enable storage providers to prove the replication of data without the need for network transfer.
Optimized and cheaper gas usage when onboarding deal sectors, especially Filecoin Plus sectors.
Alongside these key features, the upgrade includes a range of other enhancements and fixes, further enhancing the network’s performance and user experience.
Learn more

Network upgrades are no small feat. They involve extensive collaboration across various teams within the Filecoin ecosystem. For the ‘Watermelon’ upgrade, this collaborative effort was particularly crucial. We thank the teams who rigorously tested the upgrade over several weeks. Their dedication ensured the stability and integrity of the network, paving the way for a smooth transition as Watermelon went live on the mainnet.

In the coming months, Filecoin Foundation will continue to steward proposed changes to the Filecoin governance system as pushed forward through the FIP0001v2 initiative in addition to supporting other technical improvements to the network that would land in future network upgrades.

You can keep tabs on Governance by following us on X at @Fil_Gov, joining our monthly governance calls, and following discussions and new ideas in the FIPs GitHub repo.