This Month in Forest - March 2026

[LesnyRumcajs]

This Month in Forest 🌲

Welcome to the March edition of This Month in Forest! Busy month, as always, so let's get into it. Also, make sure to upgrade to the latest version of Forest v0.32.4.

Highlights

Archival snapshot docs and calculator

Archival snapshots aren't very obvious to use, so we put together some documentation to address that. Check them out here.

There was also an ask from current archive users to make it a bit easier to grab the correct snapshots for their use case, i.e., the epoch they want to explore. Check out the snapshot calculator.

Latest RPC API conformance report

We revamped the conformance report a bit to make it more self-describing (and also added a legend, just in case). Check out the March RPC Parity report here.

Forest Faucet supports Calibnet DataCap

Forest Explorer is now token-complete with the introduction of datacap faucet! It now supports all tokens that lotus-fountain supports (calibnet tFIL + calibnet datacap) AND exclusive calibnet USDFC and mainnet FIL. Nice thing there? You don't have to run it on a beast of a machine. A free-tier CloudFlare worker will suffice.

Development

Random improvements and fixes

fix n. & v. trans. [Latin figere "to attack with reproaches, to render immovable."] 1 n. A palliative shot in the system's arm, becoming less effective with each application 2 v. trans. To remove [a bug] by redefining the program specification in order to take advantage of an unexpected feature.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

New RPC methods

We added support for Filecoin.EthTraceFilter (aka trace_filter) with fast finality support for /v2. Also, at the time of writing this post, the debug_traceTransaction branch is slowly being merged into main. You won't find it in the conformance report. Why? Because Forest is the only Filecoin node that implements it. 😉

We also backported F3 finality resolution to /v1 paths. This is consistent with Lotus' behaviour.

f4 address support in forest-wallet

forest-wallet finally supports sending from f4 addresses.

Smarter GC

Forest's garbage collector is now a bit smarter; it keeps message receipts and events (configurable) so this data won't have to be recomputed.

Lots of performance optimisations

@hanabi1224 has been very busy implementing lots of performance improvements to Forest. We don't have any numbers yet, but you should totally update Forest at your earliest convenience for a blazingly fast RPC node.

See the CHANGELOG for details. Note that it primarily contains client-facing changes, so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details, you'll need to review the commit history. 🤓

Upcoming work

Our immediate focus is on:

• fixing outstanding mempool issues in Forest that hamper user experience,
• performance improvements on methods highlighted by RPC providers, e.g., eth_getBlockReceipts,
• we'll likely start looking into archival node use case; while Forest can be used as one, the performance of it has lots of room for optimisation,

And then, of course, we will continue with our regular maintenance and improvements.

Outside of Forest

This is a section where we share our activities outside of the core Forest client development (but still related to the Filecoin ecosystem). Disclaimer: this is for reporting purposes only.

bellperson maintenance

We gained maintainer permissions over the bellperson repository (a cryptography library used in Filecoin) and updated it to 0.27.0. Onto another dependency!

rust-fil-proofs maintenance

As part of our effort to update the Rust toolchain in the Filecoin Virtual Machine repository, we also became co-maintainers of the rust-fil-proofs project. We updated the aforementioned bellperson dependency and released a new v19.1.0 version.

rust-filecoin-proofs-api maintenance

And another update in a repository we ended up co-maintaining.

ref-fvm maintenance

Finally, the repository we actually intended to update. All of the above work and additional powers just for this. When we started this journey, we thought it would be a one-liner in rust-toolchain and perhaps clippy --fix. Oh well.

Another notable contribution is the cacheless HAMT iteration introduced here.

builtin-actors maintenance

Nothing outstanding.

rust-libp2p

• smart dialing feature
• minor refactor