Application for Filecoin ProPGF Batch 2

Forest - an efficient and lightweight Filecoin Node

Forest is a highly efficient Filecoin full node written in Rust by ChainSafe Systems.

https://forest.chainsafe.io/

Aleksei Krasnoperov

AlexeyKrasnoperov

Aleksei [ChainSafe]

Forest addresses a key gap in the Filecoin ecosystem: the high cost and operational complexity of running reliable nodes. By offering a lightweight, efficient implementation that lowers hardware and maintenance requirements, Forest reduces friction for operators and infrastructure providers. This makes large-scale Filecoin deployments more economically viable and reduces systemic infrastructure risk.

Forest has established itself as the most efficient and operationally reliable snapshot generation software among Filecoin snapshot operators since December 2023. These operators rely on Forest to generate large, up-to-date chain snapshots where wall-clock time, memory footprint, and operational stability are the primary constraints. In production measurements, Forest generates snapshots in approximately 30 minutes on commodity machines with approximately 16 GiB of RAM. In contrast, Lotus requires approximately 2.5 hours on high-memory systems (with 128 GiB+ RAM) for the same task. Additionally, Forest is utilized in critical network infrastructure, such as bootstrap nodes, where reliability and minimal resource consumption are crucial. The improvements delivered through this work directly benefit these operators by lowering infrastructure costs and reducing operational risks. In production deployments, Forest bootstrap nodes operate with negligible CPU consumption and maintain a stable memory footprint of approximately 5–5.5 GiB. Resource usage remains flat over time, with no observable spikes. In contrast, Lotus bootstrap nodes exhibit recurring CPU spikes of up to approximately 60% on a 12-core system, while idling at around 5–10% CPU utilization, and consume approximately 12 GiB of RAM, with frequent spikes reaching up to 17 GiB. These characteristics make Forest significantly more predictable and cost-efficient to operate in always-on infrastructure roles, directly reducing infrastructure costs and operational risk for network operators.

**Forest Core Client Maintenance and Network Compatibility** - Maintained production-ready releases of the Forest Filecoin node, ensuring protocol correctness, stability, and full compatibility with the Filecoin network. - Timely implementation and release of all mandatory Filecoin network upgrades in Forest, aligned with the published network upgrade schedule. - Proactive bug fixes, security patches, and regression prevention to maintain long-term client reliability. - Continuous performance and resource-efficiency improvements integrated into Forest releases, reducing CPU, memory, and operational requirements. **Ecosystem & Protocol Contributions** Forest is not developed in isolation. Maintaining it as a reliable, upgrade-ready client requires sustained work on shared protocol components that originated within Forest development and are now used across the Filecoin ecosystem, including ref-fvm, builtin-actors, and rust-f3. As part of Forest maintenance, the team will continue to maintain and improve these components where necessary to ensure consistent protocol behavior, cross-client compatibility, and safe upgrade execution. The team will support approved FIPs and FRCs through implementation work and participation in protocol design discussions, delivering well-tested, stable implementations aligned with network upgrades and broader ecosystem requirements.

$504,000 USD

500000

**Other - Protocol Security, Cost Efficiency, Developer Experience** **Why this matters for Filecoin** Forest targets ecosystem-level constraints that are not directly captured by the four core growth metrics, but are foundational to Filecoin’s long-term success. **Protocol Security:** By reducing client concentration and strengthening cross-client conformance, Forest improves network resilience and reduces systemic risk. A production-ready alternative client with strict protocol alignment minimizes the blast radius of implementation-specific bugs and increases confidence in protocol upgrades. **Cost Efficiency:** Forest lowers the hardware and operational requirements for running the Filecoin infrastructure. This directly reduces the cost of operating RPC services and supporting network participants, making Filecoin infrastructure more economically viable at scale. **Developer Experience:** Reliable, high-performance client implementations and shared protocol libraries (such as ref-fvm, builtin-actors, and rust-f3) enable faster development, better testing, and safer protocol evolution. This lowers the barrier for developers and infrastructure providers to build and operate on Filecoin. While these improvements are not directly reflected in metrics such as PiBs onboarded or FIL in paid deals, they enable sustainable growth by making Filecoin cheaper to operate and safer to evolve. They are also more attractive for long-term investment in developers and infrastructure.

**Outputs → Outcomes** Forest delivers continuous protocol maintenance, timely network upgrade support, and regression prevention across all mandatory Filecoin upgrades. This ensures that Forest remains a correct, stable, and production-ready alternative client throughout network evolution. **Outcomes → Ecosystem Value** A maintained, up-to-date alternative client reduces client concentration risk, increases confidence in protocol upgrades, and lowers the systemic impact of implementation-specific bugs. In addition, Forest’s lower resource requirements and operational cost profile reduce the economic barrier to running Filecoin infrastructure. By making full-node operation feasible on more modest hardware, Forest reduces the cost of participation for infrastructure providers, developers, and ecosystem services, thereby enhancing the long-term protocol security and cost efficiency of the network. **Eventual Pathway to Ecosystem Value** By ensuring the long-term viability of an independent Filecoin client, this work preserves optionality for infrastructure providers and developers, enabling future adoption, experimentation, and innovation without being blocked by client monoculture. **Who Benefits** - Filecoin network participants benefit from increased protocol security and reduced systemic risk through client diversity. - Infrastructure providers and node operators benefit from having a maintained, upgrade-compatible, cost-efficient alternative client available for evaluation, fallback, or future adoption. - Protocol and FVM developers benefit from a second, production-grade implementation that improves conformance, testing coverage, and confidence in protocol changes. - The broader Filecoin ecosystem benefits from a more resilient, upgrade-safe network foundation that supports long-term growth.

**Metric 1 - Network Upgrade Readiness** Forest successfully implements and releases support for 100% of mandatory Filecoin network upgrades in collaboration with other node implementations during the grant period within the scheduled upgrade windows. Timeline: Grant period Verification: Public GitHub releases and release notes **Metric 2 - Infrastructure Resource Efficiency** Forest consistently demonstrates lower memory and CPU consumption compared to Lotus for defined non-mining infrastructure roles, including RPC, bootstrap, and snapshot generation, enabling production deployment on lower-spec hardware while delivering higher performance. Timeline: Grant period Verification: Public benchmark reports, reproducible using open-source tooling. **Metric 3 - Release Cadence and Stability** Forest publishes stable, production-ready releases that cover protocol upgrades, maintenance, and stability improvements regularly throughout the grant period. Timeline: Grant period Verification: Public GitHub releases and release notes

Forest is a critical open-source implementation that serves the entire Filecoin ecosystem. As a public good, its continued maintenance and development rely on ecosystem grant programs such as ProPGF, which provide the most appropriate and sustainable path for supporting long-term, non-commercial infrastructure work.

Hubert Bugaj Hailong Mu Shashank Prasad Aryan Tikarya Aleksei Krasnoperov

**Protocol and Network Upgrade Dependencies** Unplanned protocol changes or network upgrades could affect timelines for production deployments. Mitigation: The Forest team is directly involved in protocol development and network upgrades, enabling early adaptation and reducing delivery risk. **Sustained Maintenance Capacity** The transition from direct funding agreements to a capped, project-based grant model limits the scope of protocol maintenance work that can be delivered within a fixed budget. During the grant period, there are concrete requests and expectations from ecosystem stakeholders (including the Filecoin Foundation and protocol-adjacent teams) that fall outside the feasible scope of a capped ProPGF grant and therefore cannot be guaranteed under this funding model. Mitigation: This proposal scopes the Forest work strictly to core maintenance and network support, aligning deliverables with the ProPGF project cap. By clearly separating core maintenance from feature development and adoption-focused initiatives, the team ensures that critical protocol correctness and upgrade readiness responsibilities remain continuously covered within the new funding model.

Forest Website: https://forest.chainsafe.io/ Forest Documentation: https://docs.forest.chainsafe.io/ Forest GitHub Repository: https://github.com/ChainSafe/forest Forest Compatibility and Benchmarks Report - December 2025: https://chainsafe.notion.site/Forest-Compatibility-Report-December-2025-2c02103664e880bcae08d4e22eca498d Maintained Repositories: - Forest: https://github.com/ChainSafe/forest - Forest Faucet: https://github.com/ChainSafe/forest-explorer - Filecoin Benchmark Suite: https://github.com/ChainSafe/filecoin-benchmark-suite - Filecoin Requests Builder: https://github.com/ChainSafe/filecoin-requests-builder - Filecoin RPC Speedtest: https://github.com/ChainSafe/filecoin-rpc-speedtest - Ref-fvm: https://github.com/filecoin-project/ref-fvm - Rust-F3: https://github.com/ChainSafe/rust-f3 - Fil-actor-states: https://github.com/ChainSafe/fil-actor-states - Built-in actors: https://github.com/filecoin-project/builtin-actors - Rust-libp2p: https://github.com/libp2p/rust-libp2p

**Node Operators** - Rely on Forest bootstrap nodes for network connectivity and synchronization. ChainSafe Infra operates a set of reliable bootstrap nodes that allow new and recovering nodes to join the Filecoin network efficiently. - Forest snapshots are widely used throughout the network. Their timely generation enabled operators, even on lower-resource hardware, to recover failed nodes quickly and avoid the need for lengthy re-synchronizations. - The latest measurements of snapshot generation speed show that Forest generates a snapshot in 30 minutes, utilizing significantly fewer resources, while Lotus requires 2.5 hours for the same task. **Lotus and other core ecosystem applications** - Rely on core libraries originally developed within Forest, including ref-fvm, builtin-actors, and rust-f3, which have since been extracted and standardized across the Filecoin ecosystem. These shared components are critical dependencies for node implementations and other Filecoin applications, ensuring protocol compatibility and consistent behavior across clients. **Chain.Love** - Evaluating Forest in experimental or limited production environments **Internet Archive** - Evaluating Forest for their use case - Forest has custom methods that, based on internal measurements, demonstrate up to a 10x improvement in performance and resource efficiency compared to Lotus for specific workloads. If adopted, these characteristics have the potential to significantly improve operational efficiency for large-scale users such as the Internet Archive.