Filecoin Dev Grants Waves 4-5 and Gitcoin Grants

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

In addition to the recent launch of Fil+ to maximize incentives for storing useful data on Filecoin, and Phase 2 of the ongoing Slingshot storage competition, Filecoin Dev Grant projects are also paving the way for interesting use cases and tooling for the protocol. Over the past year, the Dev Grant program has awarded about 40 projects to date, out of 140 total proposals submitted by the community.

Outlook for Wave 6

Have an interesting idea for a storage application, developer tool or experimental project idea? Grant proposals for Wave 6 are due Jan 15th at 23:59 PDT for priority consideration. Apply at filecoin.io/grants by making a PR to the dev grants repo. For questions, reach out to us in Filecoin Slack in the #fil-devgrants channel or contact devgrants@filecoin.org.

Liftoff Miner Tooling RFPs + Apollo Storage Dapps on Gitcoin

We’re deeply grateful to the Filecoin mining community for their participation in the network and for making both the SpaceRace testnet competition and Filecoin mainnet launch highly successful. As the protocol and network evolve, our hope is to see miner experience improve alongside a robust, diverse mining community fortifying the storage market and future retrieval market. This can be complemented by a spectrum of far-reaching storage clients.

To that end, we would like to announce Filecoin’s participation in the current Gitcoin Grants Round 8 with two categories dedicated to Filecoin:

Liftoff Miner Tooling Grants with 9 starter RFPs for open source tools to support Filecoin miners
Apollo Grants for Filecoin dapps including a number of projects from the Apollo Builders Program

Both of the above categories have up to $150k in quadratic matching from Protocol Labs available as part of the Gitcoin Grants CLR program for public goods. In addition, you can vote on your favorite proposals - contributing just one DAI can have an impact with CLR quadratic contributions. You can also suggest your own project idea and review the open RFPs for miner tools.

We have already approved some exciting projects including Lotus Farcaster (an open source monitoring dashboard for miners), and an upcoming Gas Station analysis tool + live mempool explorer. Additionally, there are other interesting miner tools RFPs including one for miner tutorials, blogs / vlogs and helpful documentation on advanced topics.

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

Wave 4 & 5 Grant Recipient Projects

We are grateful to have received a large number of proposals for Wave 4 and 5 of the Filecoin Dev Grant program - reflecting a broad range of ideas and an incredibly talented and diverse community. While we cannot accept all proposals, we are thrilled to announce the following projects that have been selected and encourage all developers to apply to Wave 6.

Wave 4

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

Wave 5

Wave 5 and future Filecoin Dev Grants are now managed and funded by the newly formed Filecoin Foundation with continued technical advisory from Protocol Labs. The Foundation is an independent organization dedicated to cultivating the Filecoin ecosystem by supporting open source software and community initiatives.

Key themes for Wave 5 were to support bootstrapping the nascent demand side of the network and improving mining experience. Out of a total of 25 proposals, the following 6 were selected:

Note that all Filecoin Dev Grants are open sourced under dual Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses and repos for these projects linked to the Filecoin Shipyard on GitHub. We’re constantly on the lookout for interesting and valuable projects that can help improve the Filecoin protocol as well as developer and miner experience.

We look forward to many more exciting dev contributions to Filecoin in 2021! 🎉