Grants Opportunities for your IPFS and Filecoin Projects | Storage Providers Summit

um i do want to introduce our next speaker michelle who works at protocol labs on the growing file coin ecosystem uh i'll let ms show michelle intro herself a little bit better than i can and get things started right now thank you so much um give me just a second to get going on the slides um hello everyone i'm michelle lee also known as mosh um in various slacks githubs and discords around the internet um really happy to be here today to talk about some grants opportunities for your ipfs and file point projects um i am calling to you from philadelphia um it's in the northeastern u.s but it's got a pretty like subtropical climate and it's about 985 degrees outside today and 90 humidity um it reminds me of the jungle a lot um especially with my friends who i go mountain biking with in the woods here um and we you know in a jungle everything's growing all the time they're intertwined um they're interdependent um you've got vines choking trees which are shading ferns um which are catching sediment so that you know other plants can take root and grow and that feels a lot like how web 3 is these days with just you know an infinite number of projects that are getting off the ground getting started you know combining to make new patterns really really exciting space but this can't happen without a few key resources water you know air nutrients in the soil and it's through this grants program that the file filecoin project is really committed to providing some of the resources uh for projects building on the stack to take root and grow so today i'm talking about grants but there's also all sorts of you know technical and you know architecture design support you know we our entire team is an open book we love to talk with you about your projects um today i'll focus specifically on grants though so um so i'm part of this ecosystem development onboarding team and our goal is to enable developers and entrepreneurs like yourselves to execute on your dreams through advocacy grants and collab support as you iterate towards success so coming in through independent projects or certain events or hackathons you know however you come in um there's there's a certain point at which projects just need a little more support or um uh or funding to to keep going and push through um and you know whether for you the escape velocity means uh business profitability or the next level of uh investments or joining an accelerator program or you know successfully building an independent volunteer community for your project whatever success means to you we want to help you get there so there's a two main types of grants programs that i'll dive into today um but there's you know like i said um this is not the only form of support we provide so if you're kind of stuck or you're thinking that you would love to connect with other communities to take your project to the next level we're happy to chat no matter what structure that takes um but i'll give a little bit of an overview of one of the grants programs it's called next step micro grants the idea is that it's a flat five thousand dollars in final coin tokens to take the next step on your hackathon or independent project um you know the main criteria is that file coin ipfs or lib p2p was used in the project stack and it can be either directly or through a framework or library or service like pinata or textile um nfc dot storage estuary anything that directly or indirectly uses the stack um qualifies it's a very lightweight application with weekly review um and it's selected based on criteria so it's not a zero-sum game there's no stack ranking if your project meets these very simple criteria um we would be excited and thrilled to support you so the applications via github issue i'll walk through how that works um first of all in the dev grants repository you can check out some accepted grant applications to take a look at what we've funded in the past take a look at how those successful applications have shared their info and then to apply you create a new issue it kicks off a template you complete the six questions which includes some proof of you know um of your open source license or uh a link to the project showcase um submission that you previously made but it's you know less than two pages uh hit submit new issue and we will review and get back to you within a week so i just want to get out of the way and help you keep building um the other major grants program that i wanted you all to be aware of is the open grants program and this is funded by multiple parties not just protocol labs a falcon foundation um a lot of other collaborators and partners as well and these grants typically are five thousand to fifty thousand dollars for novel work to apply this stack in new domains you know bring significant new usage uh add a really awesome tool to the tooling stack um so it tends to be kind of end-to-end projects rather than hey i started something and just want to take the next step um we also have some dedicated tracks for projects that integrate across web3 we just announced a collaborative grant program with hedera and with team link and there's many many more to come i would call the application process you know still pretty lightweight but a little more involved than um than the microgrant um and we review those every single month so you know average two weeks for you to get a response um and at most one month so um you know figure out your project idea talk to your collaborators talk to your partners talk to friends or you know come into the discords and stacks and and share some of what you're thinking um you can also check out the requests for proposals which are listed in the dev grants repository in the filipino project um and these list areas of interest that we're particularly interested in funding but we're also very much encouraging and welcoming of your novel ideas um after that you submit a pr using the proposal templates that's linked um and we like i mentioned we will get back to you within a month with the response sometimes there's a little bit of back and forth just to clarify what you meant or structure it in a way that's a little bit more amenable to the grants program but um in general it's still a fairly lightweight submission process and um you know we're very happy to have it be a conversation rather than a you know has to be perfect on the first shot um just a few of the projects that we've funded through this program in the past um give you a sense of you know many different layers of the stack and totally different domains um ajam is a really cool ipfs app that allows you to do asynchronous jam sessions for musicians so uh let's say i record a little guitar riff it gets posted to ipfs and then i can send the link um to to ajam to to my friend to zx over there and from five states away or two consonants away zx can layer another track on someone's mind and we can write a song together so pretty cool especially um in the pandemic when it's harder for musicians to collaborate in real life um next project was funded through an open grant totally different um you know type of project uh this is a utility that splits and preps really big files before they get stored on filecoin um and it's called gograph split so this was just an idea for a really simple nice reusable tool and go graph split is the result the last one i wanted to share is on the right it's called the geo web project and here we're funding not just software but also a system so this team is actually working with um their state government on on a plan to anchor additional property rights to physical land it's a it's an environment where property records are not um are not particularly well trusted property records with the government at least so they're working on building a you know a digital system that crosses over into the physical realm um really really cool our grants also fund community building work software educational materials so really anything that contributes to growing the ecosystem as a whole so that's that's just a showcase if i were to leave you with one message i would say it's just that we don't fight um we really really welcome you know conversation throughout the uh application process if you want to create a draft pr or file a work in progress issue we're happy to comment on that before you submit formally if you're not ready to do that that yet and just want to just want to chat um you can send us an email at grants.filecoin.org or find us in the filecoin slack at grants dash questions and uh you know think of this as uh you know no matter where you are on your journey or where you think you're headed or don't know where you're headed yet um non-dilutive capital is always a great thing so um thanks for having me here hope to see lots of project proposals and submissions in the future and look forward to being in touch thank you michelle thank you so much for that amazing presentation just got a couple questions here um so we can just get a little bit more context and i know of course we can all find out this on the slack and on github but when you think about um these grants like how are you planning on instructions internally is it more about you need specific problems to be solved or is it about know anybody who wants to continue building on this ecosystem we can do this thing how do you kind of balance uh the demand versus kind of core things that you would like people to focus on and could you share a little bit about oh you're ready you're muted by the website let me unmute um because i know how to use computers thanks frantic uh i think the balance historically has been 75 percent open 25 are you know rfp type projects um some examples of rfp projects are like the reputation service um that's being built so you can query miners and and their um their their prior deal stats and make a selection based on that or different wallets for example um but like the vast majority of the grant proposals are people submitting their own ideas and we really like to see that because it means not only they're contributing work that we wouldn't have been able to produce with you know within the the existing community but also ideas and bridges to you know domains that they are really experts in and that they care about so um yeah there's no preference when it comes to and then maybe just uh another way to dissect that same question how do you think about ipfs versus falcon in this equation and then is that even a distinction to the program yeah um i think we're taking a much more integrated approach now on the ecosystem front um where you know ipfs has always been a part of file coin it's an olympiad as well like used as really key building blocks there and um and now we're also seeing tools on the other end tools like estuary and ft.storage storage pinata that kind of wrap the two together from the consumer end so that's why you know there's no point in us drawing lines or making distinctions between projects that's use you know certain subsets of these technologies um for us it's a win to decentralize the web and and data on the web no matter you know what uh you know which which of these uh protocols is more prominent for a given builder it's absolutely fair um and one last question for me and i'm gonna put you on the spot here but could you share a little bit more about some of the rfps that are going on and sort of uh what matters in terms of priority right now to the ecosystem yeah i would love to um you can also find and read so everything i talk about you can find at filecoin project slash dev grants and then look under rfps um but right now we're making uh we've announced um several collaborations with other web3 projects right so um there's a lot of apps being built incorporating smart contracts a lot of these smart contract platforms are built to be really nimble like really fast transactions you know fast chain throughput um very lightweight and an enterprise application might make 10 000 calls a minute to to a chain and these so these chains are not designed to be really fast but they're not designed to hold a bunch of data um and so if you think about smart contracts being like the logic layer of web3 and file point and ipfs being the data layer um they work really well hand in hand and so some of the rfp areas are on building integrations between for example hedera token service and file point storage storage or um using chain link oracles uh that that takes file phone storage and connected to off-chain systems so um quite a few rfps listed in that realm awesome well um thank you so much for sharing those insights and talking about the grants program and uh we have a little bit over a hundred projects that are planning on uh submitting uh on sunday so uh we'll be sure to tell everybody how they can actually keep continuing to build on on their work and uh get more non-dilated funding so really appreciate this and uh thanks again fantastic thanks for having me good luck to all the teams