Beta-4, Fuel’s Fourth Public Testnet

We are excited to launch the beta-4 testnet, enabling public P2P access so anyone can run local nodes connected to Fuel. Fuel now reaches a crucial milestone on its way to Ethereum mainnet.
Following the beta-3 launch, Fuel has experienced significant growth, now comprising over 40 projects in its ecosystem. We're thrilled to witness our community expanding further, with numerous builders and projects joining from the recently concluded Sway Summer Hackathon and the recently announced Q4 Grants Program cohort. With beta-3, we’ve seen more than 2,000,000 settled blocks and 10,000 deployed contracts, in addition to the Fuel Wallet amassing nearly 100,000 downloads.
Please note that beta-4 is not an incentivized testnet. There will be no direct rewards for participation in this network.

Introducing Public P2P Access, Multi-token Support, and more.

Building upon the foundation of beta-3, beta-4 introduces a range of enhancements and new features. Some key features of the beta-4 testnet are:

Multi-token support, enabling native-level assets

Multi-token support allows the inclusion of sub-identifiers during asset creation. These sub-identifiers can include valuable metadata enabling native-level NFTs, multi-asset pools, NFT marketplaces, and more.

Hardened P2P networking, enabling public P2P access

Continuous improvements to P2P networking allow us to enable public P2P networking access in Fuel. This allows users to run a local fuel-core beta-4 node, which may be useful for testing or indexing applications that are deployed onto Fuel. Public P2P access will also help with stress testing and optimizations in preparation for mainnet.

New VM Opcodes

Many new VM opcodes have been added that should allow for significant bytecode size reductions in contracts, as well as various performance and safety improvements.

Parallel predicate execution

Parallel predicate execution enables Fuel to take advantage of multiple cores to speed up execution processing. Predicates are stateless and inherently parallelizable, making them a good first candidate for parallelizing the FuelVM. This will benefit the performance of applications making heavy use of predicates, such as predicate-based order books.

Revamped bridging design with improved security features and supports upgrading to a full rollup in the future

beta-4 also includes a major upgrade of the native Ethereum bridge. For deposits, this resulted in retryable message UTXOs to enable guaranteed delivery and reduced the number of steps required to bridge native Ethereum. On the withdrawal side, it also improves security and reduces gas costs for users by having the sequencer periodically commit block header hashes to Ethereum. These changes will also enable seamlessly transitioning to a full-rollup mode including DA and fraud-proving in the future.