Support Needed
As shared in New Chapter, the Interplanetary Shipyard is becoming an independent team in the wider Protocol Labs Network. It will continue to maintain and develop public goods like various IPFS implementations, tools, and network services.
Interplanetary Shipyard will require funding support from a select group beyond Protocol Labs Inc. We see this as an opportunity to gather a small group of early supporters to maintain a thriving IPFS ecosystem. We are raising $6.1M total in grants and funding to support 2024 operations for the Interplanetary Shipyard:
- 🛠️ Maintain the current suite of public goods, including the security patching, bug fixing, and releasing of projects like Kubo, Helia, and the ipfs.io gateway.
- 🚀 Execute on our 🧭 Initiatives including reliable and trustless browser content fetching for web content from dapps to wikipedia articles, HTTP interoperability specifications to push IPFS into new places like mobile browsers, opening IPFS protocols to preexisting content addressed data like Docker containers, and self-service debugging tools.
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Why should I become a funder of Interplanetary Shipyard?
Funding Interplanetary Shipyard helps ensure the continued maintenance and growth of the IPFS project. Funders have the opportunity to become part of the development of IPFS with:
- Input into the prioritization and roadmap of IPFS Shipyard team that stewards various IPFS implementations and network services - Our roadmap and prioritization will continue to be public, but we’ll do directed reachouts to funders for input.
- Priority support and access to the IPFS Shipyard team members - We’ll continue to engage publicly in Github issues, but we’ll also have dedicated chat channels with funders and our triage process will highlight issues and PRs from funders.
With an additional consulting agreement, we can also provide bespoke support and development of standalone projects.
Where will funding go in 2024?
The funding for 2024 will primarily support the salaries of core Team Members and “IPFS Waterworks” infrastructure costs. Projects are detailed in What we do but some examples are:
- $1.8M - Infrastructure costs for ipfs.io gateway, badbits infra pipeline, and Amino DHT bootstrappers
- $2.6M for “maintenance” and “service operations”
- General IPFS spec stewardship and backfilling plus ongoing maintenance of Kubo, Boxo, Helia, and tools and integrations. This includes security patching, dependency updating, bug fixing, community PR landing, and releases.
- Maintenance and operational support for “IPFS Waterworks” infrastructure.
- $1.3M for new initiatives
- New endeavors included in our 🧭 Initiatives including Reliable, decentralized, and verified retrieval of CIDs in browsers.
- New “IPFS Waterworks” initiatives including Rainbow, the gateway-focused IPFS implementation, and scaling the badbits pipeline and community.
- $0.3M for other business services and admin
How will I be able to gauge the impact of the team?
In addition to our ongoing work in public forms like GitHub, we will produce public quarterly reports on our progress, impact, and plans. Annually, we’ll report our budget and funding usage to funders. We certainly welcome inquiries or suggestions beyond these checkpoints as well.
How can I support?
In partnership with the Open Impact Foundation, a charitable foundation focusing on the support of digital public goods, we are establishing a setup for collecting donations. We will be able to support bank-to-bank and crypto transactions. 100% of your grant (minus administrative fees) will go to the maintenance, development, and operations of our projects as discussed above by enabling our exceptional team to stay dedicated to these efforts. This will be completed by end of 2023, but your verbal commitment in the interim is very helpful. PleaseContact Us if you’re interested in supporting or learning more 🙏.