[Blog] Grants Program Update, January 2023

Grants Program Update, January 2023

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 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

2023 has been off to a great start with new grant proposals and progress reports for existing grants. We’ve been fortunate to approve one of those new proposals already, and plan to review the others on our normal schedule.

Every grantee must provide monthly progress reports, and the committee was pleased with the updates presented so far. These reports are an essential step in maintaining the transparency associated with the program and the dispersement of funds.

Alphaday

Link

What is it?

Alphaday is a Sia news, on-chain data, and social media aggregator.

Grant Status

Approved

Updates

Alphaday was a brand new proposal that presented us with a first-time challenge — development will require the project to use closed-source libraries or other components, while other critical components (and the new project code itself) will be open-source and transparent. This led to a new consideration for us, that we summarized as such:

“Projects can use closed-source components, but can’t develop closed-source code.”

Obviously, approval of proposals is still at the discretion of the committee, but this should give projects a little bit of flexibility in the future.

Lume Web Progress Update

Link

Grant Status

In development

Updates

Derrick provided an incredibly extensive update for Lume Web, with links aplenty.

Progress so far has been switching to the Protomux 1 and Protomux-RPC libraries and building a new RPC protocol based off of it from the original RPC design. This has the benefit of enabling any plugin to define a custom protocol due to the new PluginAPI.protocols

Derrick also provides a statement of focus: web3 Hypercore P2P network and related ecosystem software, browser extension and related ecosystem software, educational and community Sites, and a new web portal software stack.

Sia Satellite Progress Update

Link

Grant Status

In development

Updates

Courtesy of Mike, Sia Satellite sees significant progress as well, selecting a payment provider as well as sorting out account logistics.

I had to change my initial planning and focus on the user accounts and the payment processing first. The users can now create accounts, log in, change their passwords, and delete their accounts if they like. When they log in, they are redirected to the dashboard (still work in progress) where they can see their balance and some Sia network averages and create a payment plan based on their storage requirements.

What’s next for Sia Satellite? Adding a Stripe webhook to update the user balance after payment, followed by moving from test mode to live mode, moving HostDB from JSON to MySQL and optimizing the payment calculation, creating a command-line client to improve the control of the daemon, and moving on to form contracts with the hosts.

Coming Next

The committee has two other new proposals to review, including our first research-centric proposal which should give us something fun to talk about. We’re still really excited to see proposals continue to stream in, and are emboldened by the variety of each one. The program seems to be making progress towards its goal of enriching the Sia ecosystem.

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

Steve

steve#4381 on Discord