The IPFS Implementations Grants program exists to advance the development, growth, and impact of the IPFS project
through a focus on developer choice and availability. We provide financial support to projects and teams working to
make IPFS accessible to more developer communities.
We recently ran the Spring 2025 grant cycle for utilities (opens new window), which supports
developers creating essential utilities, libraries, and tooling for the IPFS ecosystem. It was a tight competition with strong contenders
and we're delighted with the grantees who came out of this round.
# rsky-satnav CAR Explorer from Rudy Fraser, BlackSky
If you're anywhere near work on the AT Protocol (opens new window) then you surely know Rudy Fraser, among other things for his
work on BlackSky (opens new window) and the rsky (opens new window)
(say "risky") projects.
The grant will go to rsky-satnav (opens new window) (Structured
Archive Traversal, Navigation And Verification — we do appreciate a quality acronym), a local-first and user-friendly
CAR (opens new window) explorer for AT Protocol.
CAR archives are a very convenient part of the IFPS ecosystem, used to package up multiple CID-addressed resources
in one bundle, and AT Protocol PDSs rely on them for data exports. But end users, even technical ones, have found
dealing with CAR files challenging due to a lack of tooling. We really look forward to playing with rsky-satnav
ourselves!
# CAR Indexing from Ben Lau, Basile Simon, and Yurko Jaremko, Starling Lab
Another issue with CAR files is that they are as diverse as the data usecases and ergonomics of the IPFS ecosystem:
while Filecoin uploading returns a CAR file, it sidesteps the UnixFS and thus most CAR tooling cannot reconstruct or
navigate its contents. As these big-data archive files are not introspectable with UnixFS tools, the Starling Lab (opens new window) team is open-sourcing
some indexing tools they created internally which create a private index of Filecoin uploads, rounding out a historic
tooling/interop gap in the ecosystem.
Ben, Basile, and Yurko are developing a browser-based tool to help
locate contents within Filecoin CAR archives (opens new window), without relying on
public indexing services. This is a stepping stone to more general solutions for CAR indexing. It's definitely going to
boost that part of the ecosystem!
# DASL Testing from Cole Anthony Capilongo, Hypha Worker Co-operative
Not all heroes wear capes, many of the cooler ones write tests. Tests are important in development, but they
are particularly important when you're creating interoperable standards. The difference between a standard and
a random piece of paper isn't that the standard was blessed by a special standards organization — there are
plenty of worthlessly blessed pieces of paper out there — but rather that the standard has a comprehensive test
suite passed by multiple independent production-quality implementations.
With this in mind, we're excited to also support Cole Anthony Capilongo (opens new window)
(from the mighty Hypha (opens new window) working on a test suite for DASL (opens new window)'s
dCBOR42 (opens new window) (an interoperable subset of IPLD for deterministic data encoding) and
CIDs (opens new window) (a usable subset of IPFS CIDs). Cole will exercise the tests against
multiple implementations and help us fix bugs in the specifications too. It's going to be
fantestic.
And beyond that, stay tuned: we will have more annoucements coming.