It’s very exciting to see the growth of interest in the Filecoin Dev Grant program. Dev Grants are intended to spark new explorations that use Filecoin, and tools and services that help grow this early ecosystem.
New proposals are evaluated every quarter on an ongoing basis. Areas of interest cover many parts of the technical stack ranging from mining to protocol enhancements to developer and market-making tools to end-user dapps, so there’s something for everyone.
As we head towards mainnet launch in the coming months the focus of recent grants have been developer tools and projects that aim to improve the usability of the Filecoin protocol.
For Wave 3 of Dev Grants that were due in April, we received 44 proposals from the community. Among those funded are the following projects:
- MetaMask SNAP plugin for Filecoin
- Multichain API (co-grant with W3F)
- Starling Verify (capture, store and verify digital media)
- Starling Storage (user research with GLAM archivists)
- Starling Storage (API / CLI updates adding encryption)
- Proxy Re-encryption service
- Data CID Status Checker / Storage Oracle
- Filecoin Cloud Images (for Packer.io)
- Diagram of the Filecoin blockchain
Thanks to all teams that applied! Proposals not funded in Wave 3 will be re-considered in Wave 4. Wave 4 proposals are due July 1st at 23:59 PDT for priority consideration. We will evaluate later proposals as capacity allows. A list of Wave 4 RFPs is available and we also encourage teams to apply for Open Grants with your own ideas.
There is also an exciting 30-day HackFS virtual hackthon coming up on July 6th where you can noodle on new Filecoin experiments with other dapp developers and receive technical advice and support. Apply for HackFS to participate!
PB-scale miner testing RFP update
We received 48 proposals in Wave 3 for PB-scale miner testing RFP. Because proofs will continue to evolve, for this grant we have decided to focus on understanding the performance and tradeoffs of different storage layer options better. We will be reaching out to select teams who described interesting storage layer technology in their proposals soon.
Filecoin mining operators with large amounts of storage are also encouraged to participate in the upcoming SpaceRace world-wide testnet incentives program.
Cheers to all community members who submitted dev grant proposals and we hope to see more of you in upcoming waves!