Fast, Secure, and Scalable: How F3 is Reshaping the Future of Onchain Storage

Fast Finality in Filecoin (F3) represents one of the biggest storage-retrieval lifecycle improvements in the network’s history, speeding up finality on the network by 450X and making the future of Filecoin fast, secure, and accessible to a wider range of applications than ever before. By reducing finality time from 7 hours down to a few minutes, Filecoin’s finalization time will be on par with chains like Ethereum (~15 minutes). Here are some of the network benefits it unlocks:  

Bringing Filecoin Storage Deals Cross-chain 

Filecoin Fast Finality speeds up how people can bring new onchain storage contracts from other networks to interface with Filecoin. F3's reduced confirmation periods for Filecoin storage service events improve its interoperability, making purchasing Filecoin storage using other currencies more accessible. 

Filecoin's role as a standalone L1 blockchain is expanding thanks to cross-chain deals, where historically, users would purchase decentralized storage directly, presenting obstacles for developers building in other ecosystems due to long confirmation times. With F3, bridges will settle faster, enabling Filecoin's cross-chain integrations to simplify the user experience and deliver affordable and efficient decentralized storage to other blockchain ecosystems. 

Improved Builder Experience 

With F3 operating alongside Expected Consensus (EC), finalization times are reduced from 7.5 hours (900 epochs) to just minutes, offering improved experiences for both developers and everyday users. Its implementation makes Filecoin a viable building block for new use cases and business models that can utilize the network's offering. 

For developers, F3 offers support for legacy Ethereum transactions, allowing builders to bring more popular Ethereum contracts to Filecoin by simply redeploying older Ethereum contracts to the network. This support extends to anyone who wants to use popular Ethereum wallets, like Coinbase Wallet, to interact with Filecoin, meaning more accessibility and an improved user experience for those already familiar with Ethereum tools.

Serving a Wider Range of Applications 

F3 creates a more responsive environment for builders to develop a wider variety of applications like payment processing for onchain storage, decentralized finance (DeFi), and gaming that require low latency, L2 subnets such as Interplanetary Consensus (IPC), smart contracts, and chain bridges. 

F3's improvements focus on optimizing scalability, efficiency, and interoperability; builders have more resources to keep their data secure while unlocking its value. Better user experience using Filecoin in conjunction with other networks like Ethereum is critical for the growth of the Filecoin L2 ecosystem, as a higher number of applications generates more opportunities to drive onchain activity, and more onchain activity benefits the entire network. By ensuring transactions remain on the network, Filecoin experiences stronger economic loops and strengthens its overall economic model. 

As Filecoin's scope expands from a primarily decentralized storage network to a broader marketplace for blockchain-based cloud services, Filecoin is poised to become indispensable for the future of data, and F3 is a key development in its evolution. 

Conclusion 

For the Filecoin network, storage is just the start. F3's implementation allows Filecoin to improve its usability across a wider variety of applications while opening the door for new use cases. Alongside other upcoming network developments, F3 represents a critical step in not only bolstering the network's storage capabilities but also establishing Filecoin as a leading platform in the decentralized web and broader distribution layer for decentralized services.

Learn more about the development and timeline of F3 in FilOz's series: The F3 Journey.