Filecoin Dev Grants Waves 4-5 and Gitcoin Grants

As the Filecoin ecosystem continues to grow, additional projects are being developed to facilitate an exciting range of storage applications, developer tools, and integration experiments.

In addition to the recent launch of Fil+ to maximize incentives for people to store useful data on Filecoin, and the ongoing second phase of the Slingshot storage competition, the Filecoin Dev Grant program is also paving the way for interesting use cases and tools for the protocol. Over the past year, the Development Grant program has awarded a total of 40 projects out of 140 proposals submitted to the community so far.

Have an interesting idea for a storage application, developer tool, or experimental project? Wave 6 proposals are open until January 15th at 23:59 PT, with priority consideration. Apply at filecoin.io/grants by making a PR to the Developer Grants repo. If you have questions, reach out to us in the #fil-devgrants channel on Filecoin Slack, or contact [email protected].

We are very grateful to the Filecoin mining community for participating in the development of the Filecoin network and for making the SpaceRace testnet competition and the launch of the Filecoin mainnet a huge success. As the protocol and network develop, we hope to see miners gain more experience while also building a strong and diverse community for us; this will provide positive impact on the storage market and the retrieval market, which can be complemented by a series of far-reaching storage clients.

To that end, we are announcing that Filecoin will be participating in the current Gitcoin eighth round of grants, with two categories specifically for Filecoin:

1. Liftoff Miner Tools Grant with 9 launch RFPs for open source tools to support Filecoin miners

2. Apollo Grants for Filecoin dapps, including multiple projects in the Apollo Builders program

Both of the above categories are part of the Gitcoin Grants CLR program offered by Protocol Labs, which can provide up to $150,000 in quadratic matching for public goods. In addition, you can vote on your favorite proposals - contributing just one DAI can have an impact on CLR quadratic contributions. You can also propose your own project ideas and check out the open RFP for miner tools.

We have approved some exciting projects including Lotus Farcaster (an open source monitoring dashboard for miners), the upcoming Gas Station analysis tool, and a real-time mempool explorer. There are also other interesting miner tool RFPs, including miner tutorials, blogs/vlogs, and useful documentation on advanced topics.

If you are interested in supporting or building tools to further develop the Filecoin mining and storage dapps, Liftoff and Apollo Grants are open for contributions and new proposals until January 15th. Proposals can be made through the Filecoin Development Grants repo or the Gitcoin Grants - Create Grant link.

We are grateful to have received a large number of proposals for Filecoin Dev Grant projects for Wave 4 and Wave 5, which reflect a wide range of ideas and a very talented and diverse community. While we cannot accept all proposals, we are pleased to announce the projects that have been selected below, and encourage all developers to apply for Wave 6.

We received 29 proposals in response to our Wave 4 RFP along with public topics and selected 10 recipient teams. These range from Filecoin integration with popular existing IPFS developer tools like OrbitDB, support for Filecoin addresses in ENS and DIDs, early support for cross-chain integration with Ethereum, Filecoin proof library optimizations, and interesting data platform integrations for social media data, video, and legislative government archives. The list of projects includes:

1. OrbitDB Filecoin Integration

2. Filecoin DID linking and authentication and pinning documents on Filecoin

3. ENS supports Filecoin addresses

4. OpenRPC supports Lotus automatically generated API documentation

5. Montgomery multiplication improves Filecoin’s FFI

6. Lighthouse Ethereum-Filecoin Smart Contract Storage Infrastructure

7. DAG-JOSE off-chain encryption codec on IPFS

8. Livetree tracking metadata on Filecoin + video encryption

9. Decentralization of People’s Power - Government Archives on Filecoin

10. Social Media Archive App

11. Snarks as a service platform for miners

Wave 5 and future Filecoin development grants are now managed and funded by the newly formed Filecoin Foundation, an independent organization dedicated to fostering the Filecoin ecosystem by supporting open source software and community initiatives, with ongoing technical advice from Protocol Labs.

The key themes of Wave 5 are to support the nascent demand to bootstrap the network and improve the mining experience. Out of a total of 25 proposals, the following 6 were selected:

1. Kontext.app — Social bookmarking by linking network data to Filecoin

2. Nelumbo — MacOS desktop client for local Filecoin devnet

3. Stellar Protocol - GeoDID for GeoTIFF and Explorer for Geospatial Data

4. Deplatformer — Backing up social media profile data to Filecoin

5. Open Miner Marketplace — Social Reputation of Filecoin Mining

6. Portable User Storage for Dapps — Dapp storage on behalf of users

7. Glif Tool - Automatic build, test version control, release and publish

Please note that all Filecoin development grants are open source under the Apache 2.0 and MIT dual licenses, and these projects are linked to Filecoin on Github. We are always looking for interesting and valuable projects that can help improve the Filecoin protocol and the experience for developers and miners.

We look forward to making more exciting development contributions to Filecoin in 2021!