Congratulations to the Hedera x Filecoin Grant Program Winners
Apr 21, 2023
Filecoin Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the Hedera x Filecoin grant program. This collaboration combines Filecoin’s peer-to-peer storage network with the Hedera public ledger for fast, low-cost transactions. The Hedera x Filecoin grant program will collectively award $200,000 USD to six winning projects.
The largest prize is a $75,000 USD Decentralized Storage SDK for Hedera & Demo Application Award to fund a project that seamlessly integrates existing Hedera and Filecoin toolchains. This award goes to the Xact-Team. They will build a program that will provide developers with an SDK that uses both the Hedera Token Service and Filecoin storage to make it easy to mint NFTs on the Hedera network, while storing metadata and multimedia on Filecoin’s decentralized storage network using nft.storage.
Five additional prizes, ranging from $5,000 USD to $50,000 USD, go to winning proposals for real-world applications. Developers had wide latitude to propose virtually any type of application or use case, provided it combines both Hedera Token Service and Filecoin’s decentralized storage capabilities. Here’s a list of the winners for these real-world application prizes:
1st Prize ($50,000): Itheum Decentralised Data Brokerage, for an initiative to leverage Filecoin and the Hedera network as a unified platform supporting a decentralised data brokerage service.
2nd Prize ($30,000): Tokenized Research, a project that combines Filecoin and Hedera to provide distributed, trustless version management of research documents to mitigate data fraud in academia.
3rd Prize ($20,000): Smart Legal Contracts, an initiative that supports smart legal agreements on the Hedera platform by leveraging Filecoin’s content addressable distributed storage mechanism to store legal agreements as NFTs.
4th Prize ($15,000): GoMint, to expand GoMint’s NFT marketplace to include Filecoin-hosted NFTs, so that creators can choose an NFT standard implementation that suits their needs.
5th Prize ($10,000): Taskbar, to build a decentralized storage solution enabling intermediate use of the Hedera File Service for temporary storage, with transfer of the transcript file into permanence on IPFS with Filecoin. Leveraging web3.storage, this project supports the preservation of metadata into a Hedera smart contract to facilitate auditing.
Why the Hedera x Filecoin grants program was created
Hedera is a decentralized public ledger designed for efficient, low-cost transactions, such as supply chain, verifiable proofs for data, payments, advertising, tokenization of assets, and more. However, the public DLT is not optimized for persistent storage of large files or object data. By collaborating with the Filecoin project, these grants are a way to spur joint innovation using Hedera network services and Filecoin’s decentralized peer-to-peer storage network, which allows anyone to store and validate large-scale data as part of a global, 12-exabyte (and growing) network.
Under the hood, all Filecoin nodes use the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a content-addressed protocol for storing and sharing data. Together with the Hedera network, there are many possibilities to maximize trust for in-game assets, art, music, supply chain, financial applications and more. This Hedera HTS demo shows how HTS metadata can be stored on the IPFS and Filecoin networks, via the NFT.storage API.
Congratulations to all the Hedera x Filecoin grant recipients!