ma-sonr commented 2 years ago

Research Grant Proposal: Exploring Filecoin interoperability with Cosmos Ecosystem

Name of Project: Exploring Filecoin IBC interoperability (by Sonr)

Proposal Category: core-dev

Proposer: ma-sonr

(Optional) Technical Sponsor: Boris Mann

Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this RFP and dual-license under MIT, APACHE2, or GPL licenses?: Yes

Project Description

The problem

In its journey to become the decentralized storage layer for the new internet, Filecoin must find ways to interoperate several disjoint blockchain ecosystems. Native support of new blockchain-community protocols like IBC requires significant engineering complexity.

What we are building

Sonr is building a light-weight trustless Filecoin bridge to its IBC-enabled blockchain, allowing users of IBC-enabled blockchains to access Filecoin resources.

Why

Our aim in building the describe solution is to cultivate Filecoin use cases, enable technical interoperability with a growing blockchain ecosystem, and ultimately foster ecosystem growth. Cosmos-based chains like Sonr are able to create use-cases involving Filecoin, the Filecoin will subsequently benefit from the increased utilization of resources. Cosmos’ ecosystem inter-blockchain communication protocol makes it specially positioned to accelerate Filecoin’s in its ecosystem growth.

Value

Interoperability with Cosmos ecosystem

With the described solution, Cosmos' ecosystem of blockchains would be able to leverage Filecoin's storage resources. Cosmos ecosystem includes 100s of chains:

Cosmos Hub
Osmosis
Binance chain
DyDx
etc..

The Cosmos ecosystem will continue to evolve as more application-specific blockchains emerge, and enabling IBC on Filecoin would create the opportunity for many use-cases across the entire ecosystem. This better positions Filecoin to become the go-to permission-less storage solution for the new internet. The expansion of chain support for Cosmos also adds liquidity to the Cosmos Ecosystem overall, making it more favorable to build DeFi protocols and other projects.

Branding and visibility risks

Without the right partnerships and buy-in across ecosystems, we face the risk of inadequate visibility around the final solution. Beyond access to the best-in-class protocols and frameworks, this project will require intentional co-branding and broadcasting of its implications to both the Cosmos and Filecoin ecosystems.

Interoperability with Filecoin

While the Sonr team has visibility into the construction of its IBC-enabled blockchain, we are external to the Filecoin team and thus have less visibility into the construction of the Filecoin chain. The execution difficulty risk arises in their being adequate Filecoin resources (documentation, Slack channels) in the event that assistance with the project is needed. Our hope is that our ongoing discussions in Filecoin Github, Filecoin Slack, and with other Filecoin stakeholders will mitigate this risk.

Deliverables

Milestone: A case-study highlighting our findings, open questions, and solution next steps for Filecoin interoperability with Cosmos IBC.

Function: The ability for Cosmos blockchains to gain access to Filecoin’s storage resources.

Development Roadmap

Milestone 1

Use-case exploration

Functionality: Research around potential use-cases within IBC
- Which blockchains might leverage this interoperability initially?
- Where is Filecoin broadly applicable within the Cosmos ecosystem?
Teammates: Sonr Engineers (1); Sonr Product Manager (1)
Budgetary Needs: [In progress]
Completed By: [In progress]

Milestone 2

Best stack combination to support the IBC-compatible Filecoin permission-ing system

Functionality: Define end-to-end stack combination required to build the bridge
Teammates: Sonr Engineers (2); Sonr Product Manager (1)
Budgetary Needs: [In progress]
Completed By: [In progress]

Total Budget Requested

The total budget requested based on the assumptions below is [In progress]

An hourly rate of $200/hr
Full-time hours worked across Engineers and Product Manager
Full used towards compensating the needed number of team members

Maintenance and Upgrade Plans

The Sonr team aims to maintain the described software post grant-receipt and launch.

Note: As described by the phases in the Textile team’s blog, the Sonr team will continuously consider the appropriate level of decentralization.

Team

Team Members

Michael Amoako - Chief of Staff

Prad Nukala - CEO

Nick Tindle - Head of Engineering

Team Member LinkedIn Profiles

Michael Amoako LinkedIn

Prad Nukala LinkedIn

Nick Tindle LinkedIn

Team Website

https://www.sonr.io/

Relevant Experience

Prad Nukala

Prad has been involved with the tech industry since the introduction of the app store, making one of the first 5,000 apps at age 12. Before founding Sonr he has self developed over 10 projects commercial and open source that have totaled over 1 Million downloads. Most recently Prad has guest lectured at MIT's sloan school alongside Vitalik, Anthony Pompolio, and Yat Siu.
Michael Amoako

Michael graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2019) with mix of degrees in Business Management, Computer Science, and Mathematics. He was admitted to Harvard Business School’s MS/MBA program 3 years ago in their deferred admission program, which he decided to defer to pursue his current career path.

Before joining forces with Prad and pursuing Sonr, Michael worked at several big technology players including Google and Microsoft, in AI-focused Engineering and Product management roles. While he enjoyed his roles and impact as a leader in the Responsible AI space, he was particularly moved by CEO Prad’s vision at Sonr. To Michael, joining Prad in building Sonr was an opportunity to finally enact Tim Berner's Lee's original goals around a user-owned internet. Michael’s technical product background made him the perfect first hire for Prad.
Nick Tindle

Nick is a professional as a dev-ops engineer with a mix of hardware and software skills. When he’s not building the user-owned internet, Nick can usually be found attending hackathons, launching rockets, or building home made machines.

Team code repositories

Additional Information

We’ve spoken to several folks from the Protocol Labs and Filecoin ecosystems, who’ve pointed us towards this grants program including:

Boris Mann, IPFS Fission
Juan Bennet, Protocol Labs
Charles Cao, Fileswan
Kaitlin, Filecoin Governance
Jonathan Victor, Protocol Labs
michael@sonr.io

The grant proposal was inspired by discussions around Filecoin supporting Cosmos-based chains including Sonr: https://github.com/filecoin-project/FIPs/discussions/398. From our discussions with Filecoin and Interchain, we came to the conclusion that native support of Filecoin on the Sonr blockchain through the bridge solution described would be the most practical short-term approach. This also fits well into Sonr’s overall narrative (described below) and opens the door to many use-cases for Filecoin.

Check out the Sonr docs to learn more about Sonr!

ma-sonr commented 2 years ago

Additional partnesr: FilSwan, Brad Holden

ErinOCon commented 2 years ago

Hi @ma-sonr, thank you for your proposal! We are reviewing this project and will be in touch as soon as we have an update.

BlocksOnAChain commented 2 years ago

@ma-sonr I have some potential questions, Dragan from PL here.

What do we plan to do with:

relaying the proofs, we must first think about signature verification, so both cosmos and Filecoin FVM need to support the same types of signature in their runtime. Who will implement this and make it work End to end?

What is our plan for managing relayer infrastructure? Who and how will manage this during the implementation + who will manage it after the main implementation phase?
When you say October 30th as the end deadline, does that mean to solve all the issues + give users the ability to end, since I believe FVM would be a significant dependency to make all of this work? October 2022 is a bit premature for FVM since we plan to do a network upgrade in February 2023.