Wave 11 Dev Grant Recipients

Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs periodically award funding to critical development projects to foster a more robust and efficient decentralized web through the Filecoin ecosystem. Last month, we awarded five Microgrants and eight Open Grants to support the development of a wide range of innovative platforms and projects.

Dev Grants are a way to reward those who are adding value to the Filecoin ecosystem, encourage new builders to get involved, and seed new products and businesses that increase the utility of Filecoin. Microgrants support early-stage projects with prototypes built on the Filecoin ecosystem.

Wave 12 closes Tuesday, November 30, so be sure to submit your proposal! Read more about grantees from this last cycle below.

Microgrants

Filecoin Foundation awards microgrants to early-stage projects that have developed initial prototypes using Filecoin. Offered to independent developers, small studios, non-profits, activists, and researchers (among others), the latest group of successful Microgrant recipients includes:

Git3 — Many open-source developers have a donate button, which allows people to make a financial contribution through a third-party app. This project aims to eliminate the need for that third-party app, so every repository has the option to integrate a donation button from the outset.

Socio Dapp — This decentralized social media platform lets users support their favorite content creators through crypto tipping, offering anyone the ability to post and receive donations from others. One of the benefits of Socio Dapp is that it offers universal compatibility for cryptocurrency donations, so that content creators can receive more support and increase their content production values. All of the data is stored in IPFS.

DAOInsure — This decentralized autonomous organization aims to solve the problem of transparency with respect to conventional insurance reimbursements. The project is built using blockchain-based Oracle services, storing claims on chain and data to the IPFS.

Covision — When compiling and reporting medical data, most countries need to create and manage their own databases because there is no decentralized platform available, leading to complications when global data is being compiled. Covision is an IPFS-based decentralized project providing a single global platform to report medical data. It is also designed to address the issues of data quality and authenticity, and leveraging IPFS technology, Covision allows only verified individuals and organizations to write data.

Flutter IPFS Plugin — Flutter is a rapidly growing cross-platform development framework, and this plugin uses IPFS HTTP API along with Infura to easily store and retrieve strings, files, and JSON objects on IPFS. The code is implemented in Dart, and the plugin can be imported and used in android application projects.

Open Grants

Open Grants are awarded to projects that advance the Filecoin ecosystem, scale users, or directly advance Filecoin’s mission to preserve humanity’s most important information. Successful submissions from Waves 11 include:

Blockforge — This decentralized drag-and-drop web page builder boasts cryptographic proofs and is the first open-source solution that bridges the gap between blockchain domains, distributed file systems, and protocols. As such, Blockforge is a prime use case for the Filecoin ecosystem: building verifiable, uncensorable, decentralized web content. Blockforge provides an accessible way of creating content on IPFS together with the Filecoin protocol.

Esteroids — This project demonstrates a unique use-case of IPFS+ENS by creating tools for building innovative ‘WNFT websites,’ where some areas of the website are controlled by an NFT. They form part of a wider project to create ‘democratic websites,’ where people can be members of the website, rather than just users, and decisions will be made by the members in a democratic way.

Chest: SQL-Like DB over Filecoin — Public and private entities that analyze public data invest a lot of effort, time, and resources in normalizing it before they start analyzing it. Problems can arise when external parties want to reuse data because they don’t always have a schema with the structure of the data. and There must be a process for updating the data,and generating relationships between new and published data can be challenging. Chest is a SQL-like database that uses Filecoin as a store. When a user creates and stores data in its table, it also stores a json-schema with the current model of the data.

Cosines for Everyone — This online work platform pays people to help computers compress images, or more specifically, to create image-specific quantization tables for JPEGs. The goal of the project is to fight internet inequity in emerging economies while also encouraging people who earn less than a dollar a day to hold crypto. Sourcing from Filecoin opens up the Filecoin ecosystem to a new demographic: people who only access the internet from their mobile phones.

DeFi for Sustainable Supply Chains — The global innovation economy depends on components made from critical minerals and metals such as tantalum, cobalt, and gold. It is common for the individuals who extract these resources, which are essential to humanity’s clean energy future, to face poverty, poor labor conditions, and health and safety risks. In addition, the complexity of multi-tiered supply chains makes it difficult for downstream brands (technology companies, battery manufacturers, jewelers, etc.) to contribute to solutions in a meaningful manner.

DeFi for Sustainable Supply Chains aims to pioneer the usage of IPFS for sustainable supply chain traceability and provide a secure way to store supply chain data and expose responsible sourcing stakeholders to the distributed web through IPFS.

FS3 v2.0 S3 Compatible Gateway — Amazon S3 is a widely-used industry object storage technology, leveraged by many organizations providing services such as website hosting, machine learning data storage, and video content editing.. FS3 has been designed to act as a bridge between S3 and Filecoin, providing users with a S3-similar SDK experience, including a one-click solution to archive storage to the Filecoin network.

Filecoin Community Anthem — This project will create a community anthem highlighting the services and features offered by the Filecoin ecosystem and aims to help raise awareness within the community and beyond. Deliverables will include an original soundtrack, album art, music video, and distribution across 25+ music streaming platforms.

DataUnion — The developers of this project are building an ecosystem for data unions via a data-union-as-a-service approach. Each data union represents a vertical for a data type or a specific use case, such as restaurant data, agricultural data, sensor data, or computer vision data. They aim to use Filecoin as a permanent storage solution that is decentralised, permanently available, and cost-efficient.

We hope you find these submissions as interesting as we have, and that they help inspire further ideas for innovations growing the Filecoin ecosystem through future Dev Grant submissions.