This Month in Forest — January - Mid-February 2026 🌲

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

Highlights

🚀 New version: Forest v0.32.0 "Ember."

This is a non-mandatory release for all node operators. It resets F3 on calibnet, also includes new V2 RPC methods, a few bug fixes, and lotus-gateway compatibility fixes.

Persistent Conformance Reports

During conformance testing, Forest RPC responses are compared against Lotus responses for identical input parameters. We have been running these tests continuously for a long time, and since January, we have been publishing the results in the documentation. Check out the latest one.

Filecoin Subway + Lotus Gateway

We've tested, fixed, and documented Forest compatibility with popular Filecoin proxy solutions:

• Running Forest with Lotus Gateway

• Running Forest with Filecoin Subway

This will allow RPC providers to switch to Forest with lower effort, keeping the existing proxy in place.

🚧 Reset F3 on Calibnet

F3 on Calibnet had been effectively stalled for ~3–4 months. After joint efforts by the Forest team (@hanabi1224
💪) and FilOz, the underlying issues have now been resolved. A reset is the only way to apply these fixes and make F3 on Calibnet usable again.

The reset will take place on Thursday, February 12. Node operators should ensure their nodes are upgraded beforehand.

• Forest: v0.32.0
• Lotus: v1.34.4

Forest Visibility in ProbeLab reports

ProbeLab publishes regular reports on Filecoin network topology, including node version distribution and geographic distribution. We observed that the number of Forest nodes shown in these reports was lower than the number of nodes we know are actually running. The team identified the reason some nodes were not being detected and has fixed it. As a result, Forest will become more visible in ProbeLab reports once operators upgrade to version v0.31.2 or later.

Documentation Update

Check out our latest guides on how to:

• Use Forest with Metamask
• Run Forest as a systemd Service

Development

🏎️ Improved performance

The performance of the Filecoin.EthGetBlockByHash and Filecoin.EthGetBlockByNumber methods, which are among the top 50 most popular methods, has improved significantly. Forest now responds to both of these methods within 3 milliseconds, which is on par with Lotus' response speed. The full comparison and benchmark are available in the Forest Compatibility and Benchmark Report - February Edition.

Strict mode for JSON-RPC

We merged a PR that improves correctness in Forest's JSON-RPC handling. The change introduces an optional strict mode, enabled by the env variable FOREST_STRICT_JSON, that rejects JSON-RPC requests with duplicate keys instead of accepting ambiguous input. This helps catch malformed requests earlier while keeping the default behavior and performance unchanged. Thanks @Dyslex7c for your valuable contribution!

RPC methods

We implemented several /v2 RPC methods:

• Filecoin.EthGetBlockReceiptsLimited,
• Filecoin.EthGetBlockReceipts,
• Filecoin.EthGetBlockTransactionCountByHash,
• Filecoin.EthGetBlockTransactionCountByNumber,
• Filecoin.EthGetCode,
• Filecoin.EthGetStorageAt,
• Filecoin.EthGetTransactionByBlockNumberAndIndex,
• Filecoin.EthTraceBlock,
• Filecoin.EthTraceReplayBlockTransactions.

There are just 3 methods left to finish the Eth v2 implementation.

Backfill full tipsets from the network

Added a new environment variable FOREST_RPC_BACKFILL_FULL_TIPSET_FROM_NETWORK that enables backfilling full tipsets from the network in select RPC methods.

Why is this useful? By default, Forest stores only minimal tipset data to save disk space. However, some RPC methods require full tipset information that may not be available locally. When this variable is enabled, Forest will automatically fetch the missing data from the network, ensuring these RPC calls succeed even for historical data that wasn't fully stored. This is particularly useful for archival nodes and RPC providers who need to serve historical queries without maintaining a complete local copy of all tipset data.

Fixes of various RPC methods

The team worked hard on identifying and fixing edge-case bugs in RPC methods such as:

• Filecoin.EthGetBlockByNumber,
• Filecoin.EthGetBlockByHash,
• Filecoin.ChainGetTipset,
• Filecoin.GasEstimateMessageGas

and others.

Other

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