Paying it forward

The Textile team (the folks behind Tableland) are humbled to have received an IPFS Impact Award, recognizing our contributions to the IPFS ecosystem. This award is part of a larger initiative to fund new and improved IPFS implementations, which the PL (Protocol Labs) network is calling the “IPFS Implementations Fund”. The fund is being created to accelerate IPFS adoption via new implementations and integrations. Protocol Labs has committed to a 5-year roadmap to take IPFS to the next level, and this roadmap includes millions of dollars in grants and RPFs, as well as retroactive impact grants for those projects that have made lasting impacts on the ecosystem now and in the past.

The initial scope of the fund is geared towards projects that accelerate IPFS adoption through things like current and new implementations of IPFS, IPFS project community stewardship, major developer productivity and tooling efforts, and platform or language-specific integrations. So this includes things like:

  • New IPFS implementations across various programming languages,

  • Key platform integrations (i.e., gaming, cloud, etc),

  • Key tooling integration (i.e., CI+CD, testing, etc),

  • New approaches to collaboration/encryption, and

  • Major event organization or documentation efforts

The fund also includes a Retroactive Impact Award component, designed to reward work that — in hindsight — was/is essential for catalyzing the impact of IPFS. This first retroactive fund (which includes a $100k prize pool) was awarded to projects and individuals who’s work over the past 12 months was instrumental in making IPFS available to more folks, in more places, and in more ways. All eligible projects were sourced and voted on by community via Twitter and the IPFS newsletter. Further, expert assessment was provided by 15 IPFS “gurus” from multiple different organizations in multiple different areas, who all provided input via quadratic voting. This whole process is all part of a retroactive impact assessment pilot that the PLN (Protocol Labs Network) is developing, and it is slated to provide a powerful framework for retroactive funding well beyond the IPFS ecosystem!

The first round of impact award winners were announced recently during the highly successful IPFS Camp 2022, and Textile is extremely proud to be among those teams selected! The pool of winners includes 18 teams ranging from new IPFS implementations, to a plugin for gaming, to writing a lot of emails on behalf of the IPFS community, to building tooling and developer docs, and more.

Textile has been an active contributor to the IPFS/Filecoin ecosystem for many years, and we are delighted to be recognized by the community as having made a positive impact on the IPFS ecosystem. We are consistently impressed by the impact created by the IPFS community, and we look forward to continuing to work on meaningful contributions to IPFS and the broader IPFS ecosystem via Textile and Tableland.

We love this community, and we will continue to play a key role in its evolution.

With the importance of community in mind, we’ve decided to allocate the Impact Award Funds we received to a new program that will support builders exploring novel use cases combining Filecoin and/or IPFS with Tableland… stay tuned for more details on that in the coming weeks!

In the mean time, start thinking about how you and your team might be able to combine Filecoin’s decentralized storage solution Tableland’s permissionless relational database. We can’t wait to see what you come up with, and pay it forward!

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