NEAR and Filecoin Ecosystems to Accelerate the Growth of the Web3 Stack

In July 2021, Textile launched the Filecoin-NEAR bridge, taking the first step to provide simple, permissionless storage for smart contracts on NEAR — a sharded layer 1 blockchain protocol for building user-friendly decentralized applications. The novel storage bridge creates a seamless way for NEAR applications, smart contracts, or NFTs to integrate Filecoin-based storage of any form of data. In addition, to encourage utilisation of the bridge, storage costs on Filecoin via the bridge have been and will be provided free.

Today the collaboration between the Filecoin ecosystem and the NEAR ecosystem deepens with the launch of a $300,000 joint grants program designed to support developers interested in exploring new opportunities at the intersection of these two protocols. Upon receiving a grant, projects will also gain access to the global collectives of both NEAR and Filecoin to support product development and user growth.

About NEAR: A Developer Friendly, Sharded, Proof-of-Stake Public Blockchain

NEAR is a decentralized application platform built to bridge the users of today’s Internet to the blockchain-based web of the future. NEAR is a PoS layer 1 blockchain platform, built with UX and DevX in mind. NEAR’s novel sharding mechanism, Nightshade, parallelizes computation on chain and automatically increases capacity when needed, resulting in theoretically infinite scalability.

NEAR Protocol is built by a world-class team of engineers and entrepreneurs, who have won two ICPC world championships and medals, Google Code Jam and TopCoder. NEAR is backed by A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures. To learn more about NEAR, please visit their official website or follow their Twitter and Telegram.

More than just Storage: Filecoin offers a unique Web3 Building Block

The Filecoin Network offers the following features that make it attractive for both Web2 and Web3 use cases and developers.

Content Addressable Data — Filecoin is a decentralized storage network built on content addressable data at the heart of Web3.
Verifiable Storage with Proofs — The Filecoin blockchain verifies that all data is continuously stored on the network every 24 hours; proof of this can be bridged to other smart contract systems.
Decentralized Storage at Scale — The Filecoin network is onboarding more than 1PiB of storage capacity every hour.
Flexible Storage Options — A global network of storage providers, each offering different features and local optimizations, allow for maximal composability and emergence.

Filecoin brings a unique building block to the Web3 ecosystem and the intersection of NEAR and Filecoin promises new applications and use cases. You can learn more about business opportunities on Filecoin in this video.

Joint Grants for Filecoin and NEAR Application Development

Filecoin and NEAR are offering a $300,000 grant pool to developers. Any project that demonstrates or enables integrations between Filecoin and NEAR are encouraged to apply and all eligible projects will receive funding towards further development.

Here are some potential areas of exploration:

Decentralized Storage SDK + Demonstration app: An SDK for NEAR users to seamlessly employ Filecoin’s decentralized storage network, along with a demonstration application. The accompanying demonstration application should showcase the functionality of the SDK, as well as serve as a reference architecture for other NEAR developers.
Database APIs: Database overlays to make interacting with raw storage on Filecoin easier and more efficient.
New Web3 Applications:
- Novel Web3 interactions such as Data Bounties, DataDAOs, Verifiable Computation, Perpetual Storage, Layer 2 Protocols, etc., leveraging verifiable storage on Filecoin, smart contract abilities on NEAR, and data bridge built by Textile.
- DeFi applications that interact with textile.io or other reputation indexes for Filecoin storage providers. These applications can also utilize the Aurora Bridge.
Exploratory: Applications written in assembly script using web3.storage. For example, applications that allow users to store encrypted data on Filecoin that can only be decrypted by users with NEAR private keys, in that way keeping ownership of their data.

If you would like to participate in the Filecoin-NEAR Grant Program, please apply here by October 31, 2021 for consideration. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so early submissions are encouraged.