GM Frens! Team Fimio is here for EthDenver, and we are super pumped to be spending the week with all our web3 crypto frens.

First things first, the #BearMarket has had very little impact on the energy and excitement of the community. One might even go far and say that the #BearMarket has had the unintended effect of filtering for builders who are enthusiastic about the fundamental technology that we are all inventing 🎉.

We at Fimio are delighted about meeting with our Protocol Lab Network (PLN) frens IRL because we energize each other. One of the reasons we choose to partner with Protocol Labs (PL) is our shared belief in “moving humanity forward,” through an open and permissionless internet. A criticism that we crypto/web3 people get from the larger technology ecosystem is that we haven’t being able to deliver on a killer app that will move web3 from the fringes and into the mainstream. I agree with that wholeheartedly because they are correct 😃.

Juan Benet's clarity of thought around the particular problem of actualizing the crypto vision to reality is a reason why Fimio partnered with Protocol Labs Network.

We spent a good chunk of our day at the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) Hacker Base co-working, networking, and learning more about the FVM. I spent sometime speaking with @vik_kalghatgi from the PL Cryptoeconomic Labs to learn more about the why behind creating the FVM. At Fimio, a primary focus for us is scaling permissionless technologies around smart contracts through reputation; so you can imagine that a new smart contract type is something we are deeply interested in.

I asked Vik to explain to me why we need a new VM in L1. Wasn't the Ethereum VM enough? Why another one? He graciously explained to me the need for accessing "state" at a storage level. Just like the EVM allows us to determine that state of every block in the Ethereum blockchain, the FVM similarly allows us to determine that state on the filecoin network. That is HUGE!!!!

The FVM unlocks compute over data.

It enables cryptographically signed verifiability over data. To bring it down to a concrete example, let's take large-scale machine learning, something that we at Fimio work on daily. Today when we ML folks build our ETL (Extra, Load, Transform) pipelines we have to put our trust into the hands of a third party to host our compute. So far, the corporations we rely on to host our compute are incentivized to ensure that our data is safe and secure. And these corporations do their best to give us this guarantee. With the FVM, we have cryptographical verifiability all along the pipeline. ML workloads don't have to trust a third party, the third party can give mathematically signed guarantees of data integrity as well as compute integrity by having the code of the customer pipeline implemented in a smart contract running on the FVM. That is some mind-blowing innovation that will surely move humanity forward.

We look forward to digging deeper into the code of the FVM, and into their smart contract. Once we have a better understanding of the FVM, we will be able to better understand how we can leverage the FVM to build a decentralized stack for machine learning.