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This was the draft that ultimately became https://medium.com/@filoz/the-f3-journey-delegated-authority-for-faster-mainnet-activation-of-f3-98f9aa69eb0c
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In our previous The F3 Journey update, we shared insights from our passive testing of Fast Finality (F3) on mainnet and outlined necessary timeline adjustments. Since then, we've made significant progress in addressing the challenges identified during testing and are excited to share a key development that will shape F3's path to be activated on the Filecoin mainnet.
So let us take a more technical dive into what the most parameters for activating F3 is, and what they mean:
One of the key challenges in developing F3 has been the dependency on network upgrades for deploying improvements and trying to finalize the parameters for making Fast Finality actually fast. After our last round of passive testing, we found ourselves facing a potentially lengthy timeline:
This two-upgrade process would have pushed F3 activation to mid-2025. Given the significant improvements F3 brings to the network's speed, finality and usability, we knew we needed a more efficient approach to deliver these benefits sooner while maintaining safety and security. So we put our heads down, and started to think about alternative proposals that could speed up the activation of F3 to the mainnet.
The last round of passive testing and need for shipping new improvements, meant that we needed to think differently when it comes to activating F3 on Mainnet.
After some careful consideration and investigation, the F3 team is proposing a new mechanism for faster F3 activation through delegating the authority of setting F3 parameters to a smart contract. The approach, detailed in the FRC for Delegation of Authority for F3 parameter Setting aims to speed up the activation process for F3, while maintaining the network's security and reliability.
The core idea of the proposal is to transition the parameter-setting process, which previously required an additional network upgrade, to an on-chain contract. This allows parameters to be set after multiple rounds of passive testing, following the implementation of critical improvements like message compression and chain hashing in the Filecoin network version 25 upgrade. Consequently, we can bypass the need to wait for network version 26 to activate F3, and instead activate F3 on the mainnet whenever there is consensus among the implementation teams that we have achieved the desired set of parameters that enable F3 to progress quickly and stably in the network.
The mechanism of the on-chain contract is designed with some key principles in mind: