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.

Spring 2025 Request for Proposals: Content-Addressed Data Tools

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 Spring 2025 cycle, we seek proposals from qualified individuals or teams for the following:

RFP #2025-01: CAR Archive Explorers and Utilities

The CAR format (Content Addressable aRchives) makes data reliably portable by packaging up content with its cryptographic identifiers. This ensures the same data can be verified and used across different systems and platforms, making it a good building block for “credible exit” and data portability. Typically found in a file with a .car filename extension, you can think of them like TAR files that are designed for storing collections of content addressed data.

Originally created as a way to create stable documents from large or dynamic IPLD graphs (including those graphs that populate “virtual directories” of files added to IPFS), CAR files can now be found in IPFS-based systems, Storacha, ATProto, and other open source projects. With growing interest in data independence – moving large datasets between storage providers, backing up personal content from hosted services, and maintaining data integrity across the web – there's a growing need for accessible tools that help people create, inspect, and manage their own CAR files.

Currently, there is limited stand-alone tooling for the CAR format. Prior art includes kubo's dag import and dag export CLIs, caribdis, and Bluesky’s goat, but they are mostly embedded within larger app-specific libraries and not ergonomic to use outside of that context. Standalone tools include ipfs-car and go-car.

We are interested in tools that make CAR archives more useful and/or more usable. Command line tools, utility libraries, and browser-based explorers are equally welcome. Enhancements or extensions to existing tools or platforms are especially encouraged.

RFP #2025-02: DASL 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 currently supported by 9 implementations or tools. Now, let’s test it. We are interested in proposals with two phases:

First, authoring a set of tests and designing a few happy-path and failure test cases for DASL (specifically its CID, dCBOR42, and CAR specs).
Second, testing against real-world implementations in approximate conformance and working through spec changes and/or test changes towards a “minor version” that exhausts major corner-cases and ambiguities.

Additional notes:

Applicants should make sure that this works as a loop with the spec to clarify and improve it as needed, rather than slavishly follow it. The DASL authors will be available for discussion and collaboration.
Proposals should include a list of implementations (at least one ATProto-based) to test against, to ensure alignment of spec, test suite, and implementations.
See https://github.com/darobin/dasl.ing/issues/25 for prior discussion.

RFP #2025-03: Improving Data Utilities

Recently, several new utilities, libraries, and tools have emerged for working with content-addressed data (CIDs, IPLD, DASL). We welcome these new contributions to the content-addressed ecosystem! We are interested in proposals to improve both longtime and emerging utilities.

The scope of work can range broadly, from technical improvements to docs, code examples, outreach, or education. This RFP is focused on active projects that show evidence of current usage and adoption (for example, Github stars, a variety of issue creators, a healthy dependency graph).

How To Apply

Submission Process

Prepare your proposal document according to the requirements outlined below.
Submit your proposal no later than Sunday, March 30, 2025.
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:

Project Overview
Technical Design
User Feedback and Adoption Plan
Schedule and Budget
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:
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 showcase 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): March 12 & March 26, 2025
Submission Deadline: March 30, 2025
Finalist Notification: April 7, 2025
Review Period: April 7 - April 21, 2025
Q&A Calls with Finalists: April 17 - April 20, 2025
Grantees Acceptance Notification: April 23, 2025
Grantee Presentations (Virtual): June 2025 (exact date TBA)

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 aims to boost open-source IPFS adoption, 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, in alphabetic order:

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