Grants Program Update, March 2024

The Sia Foundation has grant funding available for community contributors! The Grants Program was created to fund research, development, developer tools, and anything else that will support and further our mission of user-owned data while enriching the Sia ecosystem.

Just design a proposal that meets our requirements, submit it to our forums, and wait for review by our grants committee. If your grant gets approved, you’re on your way to creating the next great project on the Sia storage network.

Check out our site for more info.

The Current State of Grants

The Grants Committee has approved three new grants since our last update, spanning event archival, new filesystems, and mobile apps. It’s an interesting mix that is highlighting the creativity of the developers that the program is attracting. Importantly, one of our new approvals came from a developer that found us from our previous hackathon. Growing our developer community is a big benefit of hackathons, and we’re happy to see it bare fruit in this case.

These newly approved projects aim to enhance our ecosystem in distinct but complementary ways. DeCast looks to bring decentralization to digital memory preservation, making them more accessible and enduring. The Sia FUSE filesystem hopes to let users interact with Sia in new and user-friendly ways. And the DartSia mobile app focuses on improving user experiences and ease of access to the Sia network.

Here’s a quick look at each along with some relevant links.

Proposal: DeCast

Link

What is it?

“DeCast is a decentralized platform empowering users to seamlessly create, stream, and post-process events while maintaining complete control over their data. The platform offers the flexibility to store event recordings in diverse locations such as Azure containers, S3 buckets, or direct exports to user devices. Emphasizing user data ownership, the project is set to host a comprehensive testnet-rendered node and leverage the Sia network for robust data storage.”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

After a few back-and-forths refining the proposal against our more precise requirements, the committee approved DeCast. Our process to becoming more precise and streamlined for grantees and the committee as well.

Proposal: Sia FUSE filesystem

Link

What is it?

“The siafs, as its name suggests, will allow the creation of a filesystem mount through the libfuse library. Like any FUSE file system, users will interact with the hosted SIA files as if they were local.”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

Another of the Small Grants that we love to see, this has potential to (re)add some pretty important functionality back to the Sia network.

Proposal: DartSia

Link

What is it?

“Dartsia is a mobile application which aims to allow users of the sia ecosystem to access a Renterd node and be able to interact with it.”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

We’d love to see a quality mobile app implementation for renterd, and this grant looks to be great first steps towards that.

Coming Next

We encourage the community to provide their feedback and ask questions on the Sia Forum! Community contribution and input is the best way to push proposals and projects to the next level.

You can see the list of all proposals here, and our proposal requirements here. See you next month!

Steve

Email us!

Grants Program Update, March 2024 was originally published in The Sia Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.