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This guide serves as a starting point for Storage Providers to understand F3
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Status
- 2025-04-09: this document has been updated with latest tools available to monitor F3. It has also been updated to reflect that F3 activation will happen post nv25.
- 2025-03-20: this document was originally written assuming F3 activation post nv24 upgrade. It needs to be reviewed/updated for the current plan of activating post nv25.
🌟 Introduction
This guide provides essential information for Storage Providers about F3 (Fast Finality) in the Filecoin network. We'll cover what F3 is, why it's important, and what it means for Storage Providers.
In this guide, we will:
- Define 💭 What is F3 (Fast Finality)? and its purpose
- Explain 👥 Who Needs to Run F3?
- Discuss the ⚙️ Implications for Storage Providers
- Address potential concerns and frequently asked questions
💭 What is F3 (Fast Finality)?
F3 is a new component in the Filecoin network that dramatically reduces finalization times. Some key highlights that F3 brings to the network is:
🏁 F3 reduces finality time from 7.5 hours (900 epochs) to just a couple of minutes.
- This means that Filecoin transactions can be settled with certainty in just a couple of minutes, enabling a very smooth user experience for builders, exchanges as well as certain storage provider operations that need to wait certain amount of epochs before they are finalized.
🤝 It works alongside the existing Expected Consensus (EC) mechanism.
- In the event that F3 is not able to finalize epochs, the consensus mechanism will fall back to Expected Consensus (EC) until F3 can finalize epochs again.
🎬 It provides deterministic finality, improving upon EC's probabilistic finality.
- This means that once a block is finalized, it cannot be reverted or altered.
👥 Who Needs to Run F3?
Storage Providers: All block-producing eligible storage providers (i.e., those with at least 10TiB raw power) automatically participate in F3 without any extra setup.