2021 Developer Grants Wrap
The Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Protocol Labs regularly award funding to critical development projects to foster a more robust and efficient decentralized web through the Filecoin ecosystem.
As we close the year and look back at 2021, it’s exciting to see how the community continues to grow. This year we saw a 69% YoY increase from the number of grants awarded in 2020, with a total of 113 grants to organizations from more than a dozen countries around the world. This increase, alongside the whopping 140 requests for grants the Filecoin Foundation received across all funding categories, highlights the importance of blockchain networks today.
To further advance our mission of accelerating the growth of Filecoin related technologies, we expanded the reach of our grants by partnering with other Web3 networks that share Filecoin Foundation’s vision for the future of the decentralized web. Together with Hedera, Near Foundation, and Chainlink, we introduced ‘Joint Grants,’ a funding category that helps accelerate projects focused on decentralized storage SDK, development of hybrid smart contracts, and exploration of Filecoin and NEAR’s protocols.
Through 2021, we maintained and grew our primary grants, ‘Open Grants,’ awarded to projects that advance the Filecoin ecosystem, scale users, or directly advance Filecoin’s mission to preserve humanity’s most important information. We also added the subcategory ‘Sponsored Grants,’ geared toward projects with technical leads at Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs. We also continued to provide ‘Microgrants,’ which support early-stage projects with prototypes built on the Filecoin ecosystem.
To date, eight grantees have completed their projects. With more projects in the pipeline, 59 teams have completed at least one milestone for their projects and 45 projects are getting started.
Dev Grants are a way to support the growth of the entire distributed web while rewarding those who are adding value to the Filecoin ecosystem, encouraging new builders to get involved, and seed new products and businesses that increase the utility of the Filecoin network. Below we highlight some of our grantees from 2021:
Open Grant: IPFS Search
IPFS Search is an existing, open-source application that delivers search capabilities for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The goal for this grant will take ipfs-search.com from beta to web-scale production with an engine powerful enough to integrate with meta-search engines like DuckDuckGo and SearX, as well as browsers like Brave and Opera. In order to support an API capable of handling 1,000 hits per second, this grant will help increase the scalability of the engine — both the size of the index as well as the number of queries it can handle.
Sponsored Open Grant: Yatima
Yatima is a dependently typed functional programming language for the decentralized web, featuring content-addressing via IPLD theorem-proving via the Lean Prover frontend1, and an on-chain backend via the Substrate2 blockchain framework. The mission of the project is to make mainstream the “proofs-as-programs” correspondence between formal mathematics and practical computation. Through the use of proofs, Yatima’s goal is to make software safer, and software to make math more accessible. Formal proofs of software correctness are particularly relevant to the decentralized web, where it can be difficult or costly to correct errors after the fact. This grant will also provide Filecoin ecosystem developers with a powerful set of tools to publish formal proofs on the correctness of their software.
Targeted Grant: Coinfirm FIL AML Implementation
Coinfirm, a technology company centered on delivering high-quality compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) services for crypto companies, received a targeted grant to establish AML Risk Analysis Scope for the Filecoin network, and execute production rollout along with complete AML platform tools support.
Joint Grant: FilMarket
A developer dashboard that will offer clarity on the storage pricing, helping the user take the right decision for storage requirements.
Microgrant: HeatDAO
HeatDAO aims to take the next step in bridging creators between IRL and URL by onboarding dancers, performers, athletes, and anyone to the metaverse. This will enable performers to capture their movements and open the door to collaboration, monetization, and provenance within the metaverse. Through a Microgrant, HeatDAO aims to improve its IPFS integration, motion data storage framework, motion data callability to blockchain-based virtual worlds, speed to display files on marketplaces, and solving for cross-platform interoperability between virtual worlds.
We hope you find these projects as interesting as we have, and that they help inspire ideas for innovations that will expand the Filecoin ecosystem through future DevGrant submissions in 2022 and beyond!
