IPFS
Implementations
Grants

The IPFS Implementations Grants program was established in 2022 to advance the development, growth, and impact of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) project through a focus on developer choice and availability. We provide financial support to projects and teams working on integrations, extensions, and new implementations that make IPFS accessible to more developer communities across a variety of languages, platforms, and systems.

To stay up to date with future RFPs, please watch this space.

Winter 2026 Request for Proposals

The IPFS Implementations Fund supports a more open, resilient, and efficient web by funding implementations of the IPFS protocol. It aims to broaden the reach and impact of the IPFS project by making content addressing and peer-to-peer networking more accessible across different platforms, programming languages, environments, and use cases.

Our Utility Grants program supports developers creating essential utilities, libraries, and tooling. Grants of $5,000-25,000 per project aim to fill critical tooling gaps and strengthen the foundations of an open and interoperable web.

For the Winter 2026 cycle, we seek proposals from qualified individuals or teams for the following:

RFP #2026-01: DASL Fuzz Testing

DASL (Data-Addressed Structures & Links, pronounced "dazzle") is a small set of simple, standard primitives for working with content-addressable resources on today’s or tomorrow’s web. It is a strict subset of IPFS CIDs and IPLD, optimized for simplicity, HTTP, and longevity.

The DASL spec was published in December 2024, and is supported by a solid number of implementations. An earlier grant in 2025 produced a test suite that has greatly helped in improving interoperability and consistency.

We now wish to make implementations even more robust by testing with intentionally adversarial data designed to crash or confuse decoders (and, to a lesser degree, encoders). Our driving motivation is that we are seeing DASL used in open-ended, high-popularity protocols where hostile actors are to be expected — and we want to make sure that DASL implementations handle such inputs safely. Additionally, DASL is typically used in scenarios in which cryptographic integrity is key, but that can be silently defeated if it's possible to produce DASL data that is interpreted differently by different implementations even though hashes match.

Some inspirational sources from the JSON world are likely to help design similar tests for DASL:

• https://bishopfox.com/blog/json-interoperability-vulnerabilities
• https://seriot.ch/software/parsing_json.html
• https://seriot.ch/json/parsing_pruned.html
• https://github.com/ipld/serde_ipld_dagcbor/tree/master/fuzz

We expect the primary output to be a corpus of test vectors, complemented by fuzzing infrastructure. The primary focus of this RFP is on fuzzing DRISL¹-serialized data, but proposals that also include CIDs and CAR are welcome.

Additional notes:

• Applicants should make sure that this works as a feedback loop with the spec to clarify and improve it as needed, rather than slavishly follow it. The DASL editors will be available for discussion and collaboration throughout.
• Proposals should include a list of implementations (at least one ATProto-based) to test against, to ensure alignment of spec, test suite, and implementations. Applicants should demonstrate familiarity with the implementations they propose to test and describe how they will engage those teams.
• Extending or reusing https://hyphacoop.github.io/dasl-testing/ is desirable but not mandatory. (We are open to hearing arguments that fuzzing and conformance should be kept separate.)

RFP #2026-02: Domain-Specific IPFS Tooling

Many specialist communities — including science, media & entertainment, healthcare, and publishing as just a few examples — have their own established standards and workflows, but rely on centralised infrastructure for storage, identity, and discovery. There is growing interest and investment in IPFS across these communities, but the lack of domain-specific tooling remains a significant barrier to broad adoption.

We are interested in protocol improvements and reusable libraries or modules that integrate IPFS into the data workflows and toolchains of these domains. Proposals should demonstrate a credible path to adoption within the target community.

How To Apply

Submission Process

1. Prepare your proposal document according to the requirements outlined below.
2. Submit your proposal no later than Sunday, March 15, 2026.
3. Ensure all team members are available for a potential Q&A call during the specified dates.

Proposal Document

Please prepare a clear and concise proposal (no longer than 2 pages) with the following sections:

1. Project Overview
2. Technical Design
3. User Feedback and Adoption Plan
4. Schedule and Budget
5. Qualifications of Team, including prior open-source work

Additional Information

• License: Projects must be licensed under the MIT and/or Apache-2.0 licenses.
• Duration: This program targets projects of 1-3 months. Exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
• Contributions to existing projects:
  If you are proposing to improve an existing project of which you are not a maintainer, please check with the maintainer(s) first. Your proposal should link to an issue or other artifact showing that you have discussed the proposed change with the maintainer, incorporated any feedback, and that they support and will be available to review your PRs.
• Project Communications:
  • Grantees are expected to publish an overview and introduction to their project upon completion. This can be on a personal blog or website, the IPFS Forum, or other public place.
  • Grantees will give a brief presentation at a virtual event in June. Depending on your proposed timeline, projects are not required to be completed at this time, but should have enough progress for a meaningful presentation.
• Maintenance Grant: An additional grant of 10% of the original award will be available to support a 12-month period of basic maintenance. This can include any activity to keep your project healthy, including but not limited to bug fixes, minor improvements, community support, responses to Github issues or PRs, docs, examples, and other educational content.

Important Dates

• Informational Sessions (Virtual): to be announced
• Submission Deadline: March 15, 2026
• Finalist Notification: March 23, 2026
• Review Period: March 23 - April 04, 2026
• Q&A Calls with Finalists: April 06 - April 10, 2026
• Grantees Acceptance Notification: April 13, 2026
• Grantee Presentations (Virtual): (exact date TBA, likely June or July [CID Congress](https://luma.com/cid-congress))

Thank you for your interest and good luck with your submission! For any questions, please contact utility-grants@ipfs.io.

How to Contribute

This program is supported by Protocol Labs (2022-2025) and the Filecoin Foundation (2022). If your fund or foundation is committed to building a more open and resilient internet, consider joining as a funder.

About

The IPFS Implementations Grants program is a cell of the Open Impact Foundation, a Liechtenstein charitable foundation. Our advisors are Michelle Lee, Juan Benet, and Dietrich Ayala (emeritus). Thank you to Addie Wagenknecht, Matt Frehlich, and Patrick Kim.

Past awardees:

2025 Spring:

• rsky-satnav CAR Explorer, from Blacksky
• CAR Content Locator, from Ben Lau, Basile Simon, and Yurko Jaremko Starling Lab
• DASL Test Suite, from Cole Anthony Capilongo, Hypha

2022-2024:

• 3S Studio, for IPFS plugins for the Unreal and Unity gaming engines.
• Brave Browser, for automatic NFT backups to a local IPFS node.
• Igalia, for refactoring Chrome to support non-HTTP protocols. and other improvements across 3 major browser engines for future IPFS compatibility
• Fission, for the IPVM content-addressed computing protocol and implementation
• Little Bear Labs, for native support for verified IPFS requests in Chromium.
• Number Zero, for Iroh, a new IPFS-based toolkit for building distributed systems
• Peergos, for Nabu, a ground-up implementation of IPFS in Java and improvements to jvm-libp2p