Look Back and Look Forward: Filecoin Foundation in 2021 and 2022

Filecoin Foundation experienced tremendous growth in 2021, both in size and scope. Our team grew nine-fold in 2021, to more than 30 full-time employees, with eleven more employees joining in Q1 2022! We boosted the number of grants awarded year-over-year by 69%. And we drove several programs critical to the growth of the Filecoin network and the overall success of the network, including the Filecoin Improvement Proposals process, Filecoin Plus, the developer grants program, and Filecoin security audits. Below, you’ll learn more about Filecoin Foundation’s work in 2021 and what’s in store for 2022.

🏗️ Builder’s Funnel, Grants: We reviewed more than 140 grant proposals and boosted the number of grants awarded year-over-year by 69%. Year to date in 2022, we have received another 44 dev grant proposals, and have added 31 new projects to the active grants pool, for a total of 143 projects in active development. An additional 56 teams have completed work on the projects and graduated to the community and other funding funnels, including accelerators.

🤝🏿 Governance: In 2021, we shipped the first Foundation-led network upgrade, engaged the Filecoin community to complete the first-ever FILPoll, hosted the inaugural Filecoin Foundation Governance Summit, and managed several critical FIPs within the community.

🌉 Ecosystem Collaborations: We finalized agreements with ChainSafe to build and maintain Forest and the Polkadot networks and collaborated with Internet Archive to advance the mission of both organizations to preserve humanity’s most valuable information and improve access to information online.

💻 Storage Provider Support: We established & are maintaining the Storage Provider Bounty Board, implemented the Storage Provider Working Group, launched the second cohort of the Storage Provider Venus Incubation Program, and led the charge on porting Web2 data sets onto the Filecoin Network.

➕Filecoin Plus: We worked to increase both the speed and the scope of the Filecoin Plus program, decreasing application time from 5 weeks to 5 days in 2021. Today, the program supports more than 90 active Large Dataset clients. The program is supported by over 20 active notaries, and this month we’re holding another round of elections. Through social and technical program improvements, we have driven the average “time to DataCap” down from 2 weeks to 19 hours.

Looking Ahead

We’ve made outstanding progress in 2021, and will continue working to grow and foster the Filecoin ecosystem in 2022. We have plans to double the size of our team over the next year. We’ll focus on building tooling around the ecosystem. We’re ramping up our developer grants review/approval process while also working to reduce our time-to-build cycle by 100%. We’ll continue to expand geographical distribution of storage providers and increase the client funnel. We’re hosting a number of large-scale, in-person events including the Decentralized Web Gateway at SXSW (March 15) and our massive community event, FIL Austin (June 8). The Governance team is working to codify better FIPs processes and workflows by expanding community deliberation channels and incorporating quantitative analysis or benchmarking for governance behavior. And our Enablement team continues to build a feedback-oriented organization that values team members and supports the organization’s overall mission to preserve humanity’s most important information by building the next generation of the web.