Structured Information

Motivation & Problem Description

Several L1 blockchains (e.g. Solana, Ethereum, Flow, etc.) have large and growing state and message history, but many blockchains store their canonical message history in centralized or semi-centralized ways. Notably, Solana’s 35TB+ full RPC transaction history is stored on Google BigTable.

Chain state and full message history is an important resource for the web3 space. It is our belief that the right way for this data to be stored is for it to be stored on decentralized storage such as IPFS+Filecoin, and that the right way for this data to be addressed is with content addressing.

We want to see (1) all L1 blockchains use IPFS+Filecoin for their full transaction histories, and (2) all L1 blockchain nodes directly using content addressing to retrieve data from IPFS+Filecoin in chain sync. The core question we want you to answer with this grant is “How can we get all L1 blockchains to store their full transaction history on IPFS+Filecoin, and to sync chain state from this stored history?”

The goal of this grant is to find a team that can do a full audit of various L1 blockchains, understand how their full message history and chain sync currently works, understand what would be needed in order to have full message history on IPFS & Filecoin and have node chain sync retrieve messages from IPFS & Filecoin directly, and synthesize this valuable research into a concrete product and engineering proposal for next steps. If a grantee puts together a satisfactory plan, we may want to consider working with the grantee or some other team to build out the partial or full plan (this would be a separate grant to be determined later).

Solution Requirements

• General Requirements
  • The core deliverable from this grant is a full engineering plan with written documentation, diagrams, code/pseudocode samples, component design docs, etc. to satisfy the core problem description for the grant.
  • Concrete deliverables to describe the sections needed in the grant doc will be described in the Milestones section below.
• Target User
  • This engineering plan should be written for an audience of product and engineering leads who are deeply familiar with the IPFS & Filecoin tech stack.
  • These individuals will review the output of the grant, discuss any questions/feedback with you, and ultimately work to understand whether this plan is sufficient to meet the goals of having all L1 chain state and active syncing on IPFS+Filecoin.
• General Process
  • We will be running an application process to approve workers to participate in the grant. We will select up to 2 individuals/teams from the application process to participate in the milestones and potentially earn rewards.
    • Applications will be reviewed on the basis of:
      • The team’s engineering background and potential ability to deeply understand how several L1 blockchains work and how they should work with IPFS/Filecoin
      • Team’s experience with similar projects in the past
      • Grants that you/your team may have worked on in L1 blockchain ecosystems
      • Quality, thoughtfulness, and detail of the proposed approach for how to work on this project
  • After applications are reviewed, selected teams can begin working on the grant. For each milestone, it is possible that your team may not win the grant even if your application was selected. However, it is our intention to work very collaboratively with approved applicant teams to give you the best shot of meeting the requirements. We really want a great output from this grant process!
• Communications
  • Once the 1-2 teams have been selected, we will require everyone to join the Slack channel linked in this grant channel.
  • We will also reach out to applicant teams to schedule a time to meet the team, understand and give feedback on the grant approach, and find an ongoing time to meet/check in.
  • We will expect weekly written updates and will set up weekly check-in calls with each approved team.
  • If you have any questions about this grant, please join the Slack channel linked above to get in touch with our team most easily.
• Resources
  • This project will likely touch IPLD, IPFS, and Filecoin (and maybe some libp2p)
    • IPLD docs: https://ipld.io/docs/
    • IPFS docs: https://docs.ipfs.io/
    • Filecoin docs: https://docs.filecoin.io/
  • You can also look at web3.storage, estuary.tech, Infura’s Filecoin API, and Glif nodes as potential easy ways to interact with Filecoin
  • You can look at IPFS pinning services such as Pinata and gateways such as Cloudflare’s IPFS gateway if helpful/relevant

Milestones and Evaluation Criteria

Milestone 1