ICF Q2–2020 Funding Recipients

Last week was spent finalizing service agreements and scheduling kick-off calls with the various teams and individuals who received Q2 funding from the ICF. This is the first quarter that utilized our newly reformulated funding program, including participation of the inaugural Technical Advisory Board. It was also the first batch of Funding approved by our recently expanded Foundation Council. In conjunction with this quarter’s funding announcement, we’re also excited to start publishing regular quarterly Financial Transparency Reports, which should give insight into the ICF’s holdings and funding capacity going forward.

Details are still being finalized for a handful of Q2 funding recipients, which will be announced imminently, so keep an eye out for follow-up posts detailing these exciting initiatives. The ICF Funding team is also drafting a post on its current ecosystem priorities as a public Request For Proposals to be released soon. And if you’re interested in submitting a proposal for the Q3 funding cycle, please do so before August 31st at apply.interchain.io.

Without further ado, the first set of Q2 funding recipients:

Citizen Cosmos Podcast — Anna Protopopova

Citizen Cosmos is a podcast that unites the Cosmos Ecosystem by discovering the masterminds behind it. The hosts Anna Protopopova and Sergey Simanovsky have interviewed a number of contributors across the Cosmos ecosystem, most recently including Josh Lee aka Dogemos, Peng Zhong, CEO of Tendermint Inc. and Harriet Cao, co-founder of Iris Network & Bianjie. This grant is in acknowledgement of their enthusiastic effort to bring the Cosmos Community together and will go toward improving the production quality and regularity of their podcast.

Coconut Anonymous Credentials for Cosmos SDK — Nym

Coconut is an anonymous credential system combining blind signatures, re-randomizable credentials, and selective disclosure with a novel threshold issuance scheme. The Nym team is developing a rust implementation of the cryptographic protocol in-house, advised by George Danezis, one of the authors of the original Coconut paper. This work will be realized as a module for the Cosmos SDK, allowing a variety of privacy and anonymity preserving functionalities including shielded pools, identity assertions, and anonymous voting protocols.

Cosmos Job Board — Promise Software

Vitaliy Levit and Taariq Lewis of Promise Software will build a MVP of a Cosmos specific job board that allows companies to post jobs as well as users to post availability. This will double as the beginning of an ecosystem directory that can be utilized like a social network for contributors to the wider Internet of Blockchains.

Cosmos-SDK for iOS and Android — Riccardo Montagnin

This project improves upon a mobile library that enables the creation of Cosmos apps for iOS and Android within one codebase. The library gives mobile developers a simple way to work with keys and signature patterns and because it’s built with Dart, it can be used in both Web Dart and Flutter applications.

Eventivize — Ape Unit

Ape Unit is partnering with the CTM music festival to bring performances online using the concept of “burner chains”, low security temporary blockchains built with single use in mind using the Cosmos SDK. The work includes tooling that will allow non-technical event organizers to easily design and launch zones for one-time use.

Growing Our Networks in Uncertain Times ↔ Places — Our Networks

Our Networks is an artist-run decentralized technology conference, normally Toronto-based but now online, focused on locally owned and operated networks. Watch this presentation by Althea at last year’s conference and keep an eye out for the event September 8–13, 2020.

left gallery Registry — Left Gallery

left gallery is a digital art gallery operating since 2015, headed by artist Harm van den Dorpel. Harm was one of the first artists to experiment with blockchain-based certificates of authenticity (CoA) using Ascribe and subsequently Ethereum NFTs. After artists and collectors encountered UX issues due to limitations of the Ethereum Blockchain, left gallery proposed a Cosmos SDK chain with custom features that will improve the UX and custody features for NFT certificates of authenticity. This funding will allow left gallery to collaborate with museums in creating a network of institutional digital media registries.

NFT & Metadata Modules — ixo & Persistence One

ixo and Persistence One are leading efforts on designing and implementing new Cosmos SDK modules to support Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and flexible Metadata that will utilize DID and CID standards to support object capabilities with a robust schema for a wide variety of NFT use cases. Join the NFT & Metadata Working Group to contribute or follow along.

Off-Chain Worker Module — Relevant

Relevant is a reddit-style news bulletin website, initiated by Slava Balasanov, that uses a sybil resistant page rank algorithm to reward the creation of “relevant” content. They will create an off-chain worker system for the Cosmos SDK that interfaces with the Peggy module. Relevant is transitioning to use of a Cosmos SDK-based blockchain, where this module will be necessary for page rank calculations. The off-chain worker module will be built in a flexible way to allow for any off-chain process to be submitted by validators, a valuable extension of the current Peggy module.

VulcanizeDB GraphQL Caching with IPFS — Vulcanize Inc.

Vulcanize is a distributed solution to caching and indexing blockchain data, and then providing that data with validity guarantees and highly availability. This work will add GraphQL capabilities to the Cosmos SDK, utilizing IPFS as an underlying distributed data store and extending IPLD data types to include Tendermint-related standards. Furthermore, it will improve the experience of building and running Relayers in an IBC connected world.

Keep an eye out for more regular updates from the Interchain Foundation as more funding recipients are announced as part of Q3 2020 🚀