This Month in Forest — October 2025

[LesnyRumcajs]

This Month in Forest 🌲

Welcome to the October edition of This Month in Forest! 🍂 We are excited to share the latest updates and improvements to the Forest Filecoin client (and more!).

Highlights

Filecoin Dev Summit in Buenos Aires

convention n. [From Latin convenire "to come together."] An alibi; saturnalia; a gathering held at a safe distance from one's family; a place where normal behavioral conventions are suspended.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

Some of us will attend the Filecoin Virtual Dev Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina 🇦🇷. Come say hi! 👋 Maybe we'll have some swag for you? 😏

V2 snapshots are here!

A new format for Filecoin snapshots is now the default. Since NV27, all clients support V2 snapshots, a format championed by the Forest team. This means the latest snapshots now contain F3 data, allowing your node to benefit from fast finality much sooner! ⚡

Read more on the new format FRC-108. Links to the latest snapshots can be found in the Forest docs.

tFIL and tUSDFC faucet API

To facilitate some of the Filecoin Services development, we implemented two APIs for requesting test tokens (both native token and USDFC) on the Filecoin calibration network. These APIs are now publicly available for anyone to use!

Check out the documentation for more details.

Development

Improved RPC performance

benchmark v. trans. To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on competetive systems.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

The Forest team is slowly but surely addressing the RPC performance outliers. The latest optimizations include:

• improved performance of eth_getBlockByNumber and eth_getBlockByHash methods by caching message receipts. We observed a speedup of ~50x in some cases.

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

We implemented several smaller improvements and fixes across the codebase, primarily focusing on RPC correctness, archival data ergonomics, and overall stability.

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. 🤓