Filecoin's six FIP proposals

At 01:34 Beijing time on November 24, Jennifer, a staff member of the Filecoin project, once again reminded miners on Slack to upgrade to lotus v1.2.0 as soon as possible. The Filecoin network will be upgraded to Lotus v1.2.0 when the block height reaches 265200 (approximately 07:55 Beijing time on November 25).

Since November 10, the gas fee of the Filecoin network has been on the rise. Unreasonable gas fees have largely restricted the development of the Filecoin network. In order to effectively solve the problem of high gas fees, Filecoin officially launched the Lotus v1.2.0 version, which includes the FIP-5 proposal and removes the expensive miner reward attribution calculation from PreCommitSector and ConfirmSectorProofsValid. This move can effectively reduce the consumption of gas fees, release chain bandwidth and reduce miner costs, and can reduce the gas cost of WindowPoSt by up to 200M.

The Lotus v1.2.0 version includes the FIP-5 proposal. So far, Filecoin has had six major FIP proposals. Next, let’s take a look at Filecoin’s six major proposals.

What is Filecoin FIP?

Filecoin is still in its infancy, but has the potential to play a central role in the storage and distribution of human information. In order to help the network grow and develop, it is critical for the community to collectively participate in proposing, discussing, and implementing changes to improve the network and its operations. Therefore, the Filecoin Network Improvement Proposal FIP came into being.

FIP is a design document that provides information to the Filecoin community and describes the definition and characteristics of a new Filecoin feature, as well as a concise technical specification of the feature and the reasons for adopting the feature.

FIPs are divided into three categories:

• Filecoin Technical Proposals (FTP): are designed to collect community feedback on Filecoin technical issues. These include changes to the Filecoin protocol, changes to block or transaction validity rules, and proposed application standards or conventions. They are then reviewed by the Filecoin community and technical steering committee. They are usually followed by PRs to the Filecoin specification repository to update the protocol's specifications.

• Filecoin Organization Proposals (FOPs): Allow the Filecoin community to propose, discuss, and reach consensus on Filecoin governance. This includes procedures, guidelines, methodologies, and changes to the FIP process.

• Filecoin Recovery Proposals (FRPs): Provide a forum for the Filecoin community to discuss very limited, well-defined criteria (e.g., in the case of a protocol bug that destroys the value of the network). The community will help define this process as needed over the coming months.

Generally speaking, a FIP contains a single, clear key proposal or new idea, and the more focused the FIP is, the more successful the proposal will be.

Filecoin's six FIP proposals

On Filecoin FIP’s exclusive website, we can see that Filecoin currently has 6 major FIPs, namely FIP-1, FIP-2, FIP-3, FIP-4, and FIP-5.

FIP-1 was created and submitted by Filecoin core member why on April 3, 2019. FIP-1 mainly defines the purpose, guidelines and standards of FIP, including consistency fixes for spelling and grammar, revisions to FIP processes, and integration of update specifications.

The background of FIP-2 is that miners sometimes suffer disproportionate fines due to operational failures of SectorFaultDetectionFee (SP), especially in the absence of WindowPoSt. Therefore, the FIP-2 proposal proposes to reduce the fees for detected failures without sacrificing too much security and providing storage power . It mainly includes the following three aspects:

• Remove the cost of a successful recovery;

• Remove the fee for missing WindowPoSt;

• Adjusted sector failure fee to 3.51 days of expected rewards ;

FIP-3 renames “Verified Clients” to Filecoin Plus . Verified clients are now Filecoin Plus clients, and validators are now Filecoin Plus notaries. The effective computing power of verified clients can increase 10 times.

The mission of Filecoin Plus is to build a decentralized network of useful storage. By adding a layer of social trust and providing leverage to storage clients, Filecoin Plus makes the network more decentralized and accelerates the diffusion of high-quality services on the network by providing additional reward incentives for storing Filecoin Plus clients' transactions.

The background of the FIP-4 proposal is that after the Filecoin mainnet was launched, according to the original economic model, FIL's block rewards needed to be released linearly over 180 days, which led to a serious lack of FIL liquidity. The FIP -4 proposal proposed that 25% of FIL block rewards can be obtained immediately without linear release .

The FIP-5 proposal removes the expensive miner reward attribution calculation from PreCommitSector and ConfirmSectorProofsValid, which can effectively reduce the consumption of gas fees, free up chain bandwidth and reduce miner costs.

Filecoin official momack2 believes that simply invalidating the attribution of rewards and increasing the throughput of the chain by reducing the usage of gas is a very good proposal, and can also create nearly reasonable costs for miners.

Filecoin miners need to pay storage failure and consensus failure fees, and the Filecoin network pays these fees by using locked funds (i.e., uninvested block rewards) and the miner's available balance. If these two fees are not enough to pay the total fee, the remaining payable portion will be recorded in the miner's FeeDebt, and the miner will be declared as "owed debt", but this will put the miner into a vicious cycle of debt and inability to repair the error sector.

The FIP-6 proposal removes the requirement to repay debts from DeclareFaultsRecovered, allowing miners in debt to recover storage failures and stop paying penalties, alleviating pressure on Filecoin miners.