Finish the Filecoin Bridge!

I knew the amounts asked for in F5 where hugely optimistic. But I have the experience now to complete this, just need to actually buy time!

The idea initially was to get this somehow started, somehow get a working POC running. But running Filecoin full nodes is much more demanding as expected and set the whole project back (which already was on a shoestring budget).

I am roughly half way there now, lets finish this!

[IMPACT]

This delivers what has been proposed here:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/350731

A live bridge to create storage contracts for IPFS objects in Filecoin from inside Cardano dApps.

This solution creates a one-directional bridge to the leading chain in decentralized storage and enables Cardano SC/dApp creators to ensure the persistence of their IPFS objects via a Cardnao UTXO interface. The possibilities and impact will be tremendous!

The risk I had not foreseen when trying to build this in October was that the Filecoin Ecosystem has a lot of early stage software which needed to be weeded out in order to find which libraries and tools are best suited for the job.

The reference lotus implementation and network went from 0.12 to 0.14 while I was building this in Aug-Nov. Now the network just upgraded to 0.15 and should be stable for a while.

[FEASIBILITY]

Done: Open source Filecoin management part

week 3: Open source Cardano backend

week 6: Open source the dapp contract and go live.

I need roughly one month to six weeks of contracting myself out from my employer to do this. The rate that I can get is 90Euros/hr. I recon by planning for five weeks of full time work (200hr) we are in a safe zone here.

The infrastructure costs for development are roughly 1500$/month (includes testnet and mainnet infrastructure) but can be pushed down to up to 750$/month if contracted to run for a full year.

Contacting costs: 90€ * 200 = 18,000€ = 19,800USD

Operating costs: 750 * 12 = 9000USD

Total: 28800$

Its only me again:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiriakoskrastillis/

If you look at what I have done on Cardano (https://evolute.software/#what-we-do) You will see that I am very well versed in creating dApps (Pergamon) and operating complex infrastructure and Cardano Pools (SPEC). I also have been part of the Plutus developer community since the 1st Plutus Pioneer Programm (with an NFT to attest to that) and have contributed and created multiple open source tools (https://github.com/SpectrumPool/).

[AUDITABILITY]

The last attempt I spent a lot of time trying to reach out to existing projects, evaluating things like charli3 and getting up to date with Plutus again. This time its only going to be heads down implementation work.

1. Thousands of users use the POC to ensure retrievability of their NFTs media for future generations
2. dozens of dApps use Permanentum to create proofs, cardano side, that the IPFS data they generate will be store
3. We fund the next round of development which would be decentralizing the Permanentum bridge into an oracle pool solution in which anybody can participate by running the hardware (architecture akin to chainlink)

This project is seeking funds to finalize the implementation of "NFT Guaranteed Storage"

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/350731