Filecoin Infrastructure Services funds the continued operation, hardening, and cost-reduction of critical, neutral Filecoin infrastructure the network already depends on: the snapshot service (24×7), the historical snapshot archive, bootstrap nodes, the Calibration Network faucet, and an independent Curio-based Calibnet miner. These services support network availability and bootstrap reliability, safe and rapid upgrades, developer and operator onboarding, debugging and research, and operator diversity on Calibnet.
This renewal also reduces the network's reliance on a small number of operators and reduces the cost and hardware footprint of the services themselves. Over this term we are migrating the snapshot and bootstrap stack to run on Forest only, retaining a single Lotus reference node per network rather than a full Lotus deployment alongside every service. This lowers RAM and disk requirements substantially (Forest exports a snapshot on ~32 GiB RAM vs. Lotus needing 128–256 GiB), proves Forest's production-readiness for core infrastructure, and advances Filecoin client diversity.
The gap addressed is straightforward: without independently operated snapshots, bootstrap nodes, a faucet, and realistic Calibnet power, node onboarding slows, upgrade safety degrades, developer friction rises, and the network centralizes around a few operators. ChainSafe has run these services reliably for years; ProPGF funding keeps them neutral, available, and increasingly efficient.