Application for Filecoin ProPGF Batch 2

FilPonto

FilPonto aims to support all listed categories as an ecosystem provider of infrastructure coordination, wallet and developer tooling, grants advisory, and responsive ecosystem technical support. The specific focus of FilPonto’s H2 grant will be for ongoing FOC dev support (by supporting Hugo Dias’ full-time work for an additional 6 months in 2026), Lotus Miner / Boost Maintenance and upgrades as a 1 year initiative, and a discretionary pool for infrastructure, integration grants and support and PoCs on an as-needed basis.

### Overview FilPonto supports tooling, infrastructure, integrations, coordination, and R&D across the Filecoin ecosystem. The focus of this H2 ProPGF request is to continue high-impact ecosystem work by: - Supporting ongoing FOC development via Hugo’s full-time contributions (Advanced JS / Web3 Developer) - Ensuring Lotus Miner / Boost maintenance and upgrades - Maintaining a discretionary grants pool to respond quickly to evolving ecosystem needs FilPonto requests $500k in H2 ProPGF funding, so that its 2025-2026 ProPGF H1 and H2 combined match its prior 2024–2025 PLFIF full-year allocation. ### Background & H1 Funding Context [FilPonto’s H1 ProPGF request](https://fil-propgf.questbook.app/dashboard/?isRenderingProposalBody=true&role=community&chainId=10&grantId=67b7bd4a364bc21272aea6f1&proposalId=681238b6300aee1f22be4310) ($500k) was approved. H1 funding supports work currently extending into 2026, including: - TPM & technical support (backpay + expenses) – 15% - FY Oct 2025–Sep 2026 salary + expenses – 32% - Backpay for developers completing key projects (FilSnap, iso-filecoin, provider hints, Ledger WebHID, etc.) – 4% - Open Impact Foundation admin & legal – 5% - External contributor (Hugo) to FOC (6 months, Synapse SDK + demos) – 28% - Lordforever projects (DDO, x402 micropayments R&D, AutoCap support) – 5% - Discretionary integration / maintenance / service grants – 16% This supports the following FilPonto ecosystem goals: - Ongoing integrator technical support - Coordination around ecosystem infrastructure needs - Expansion of tooling - On-chain paid deal workflows - Exploration of new applications using existing Filecoin technology ### H2 Funding Focus ($500k - the focus of this ProPGF proposal) H2 funding will extend the above work, with focused attention and investment in 3 areas: 1. Lotus Miner / Boost Maintenance & Evolution – 40% - Continued maintenance and reliability improvements - Modularization and pipeline architecture improvements - Exploration of compatibility with FOC workflows 2. Hugo Dias – Full-time Filecoin Contributor – 28% - 6 additional months of full-time work (rate negotiable if extended to 1 year) - Contributions to FOC, Synapse SDK, demos, and developer adoption 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto – 32% - Integration, maintenance, and service grants - TSE support - PoCs for paid deal workflows - R&D into demand-side incentives and dApp-driven storage adoption

https://filponto.io

Eva Shon

eshon

eshon

Context for the 3 areas of focus explained above: #### 1. Lotus Miner / Boost Mining software is critical to get right in blockchain networks and impacts security, correctness and economic outcomes. Moreover Filecoin has significant up-front investment requirements in hardware as well as other technical operational expenditures for Storage Providers. Lotus Miner and Boost have been used reliably by Filecoin SPs for many years and often adapted to work with large SP installations. FilPonto believes it is critical to SP retention to continue supporting this software. However maintenance only is not sufficient to keep this reliable software relevant. More can be done to improve it for the future while preserving its core reliability but also incorporating new Filecoin initiatives such as FOC and decentralized object storage with on-chain payments. All current SP software initiatives have tended towards a vertically-integrated all-or-nothing type of stack, sometimes with opinionated approaches to operator-facing components. FilPonto proposes an alternative direction that can also support all existing SP software initiatives but provide a modular base layer that the ecosystem and SPs can firmly rely on for the future. #### 2. Hugo Dias – Advanced JS Developer (FOC) FOC has benefited from Hugo’s contributions to the Synapse SDK and demos. His experience bridges web2 and web3 developer ecosystems and informs how Filecoin tooling can reach broader developer audiences. H2 funding would ensure Hugo can continue supporting FOC and the Filecoin ecosystem for the full year rather than just 6 months in 2026, which can further secure these efforts. Hugo firmly believes in FOC’s potential as a decentralized object storage solution. Alongside his participation in the FOC and web3 working groups, FilPonto / Hugo propose a set of potential goals, outlined below, that would benefit greatly from a full year of sustained support and confidence in his execution and contributions. #### 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto A discretionary grants pool is useful for maintaining responsive, strategic agility in the face of evolving ecosystem needs and to sustain high-leverage public goods contributions across the Filecoin stack. This will become more important as the FF shifts open grants support to ProPGF whose semi-annual cadence and up-front scoping requirements make time-sensitive or high-context-sensitive grant proposals harder to support. FilPonto plans to use the proposed discretionary pool to continue supporting high-value integrations, support, infrastructure tools and additional PoCs as needed. One area of research FilPonto is also interested in is exploring demand-side incentives to grow Filecoin adoption. For many years Filecoin incentives such as block rewards have been directed towards the supply-side via storage providers alone and exploring ways to redirect some portion of this to also attract users could be explored.

For the 3 areas of focus outlined above: #### 1. Lotus Miner / Boost - Storage Providers seeking reliable, modular, adaptable software - Other mining software teams reusing hardened components and focusing on operator interfaces and other advanced features #### 2. Hugo on FOC - FilOz and FOC contributors - Builders and web developers - Ecosystem collaborators #### 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto - Integrators, builders, and infrastructure teams - Ecosystem partners requiring technical support or coordination - Expanded markets for Filecoin

For the 3 areas of focus outlined above: #### 1. Lotus Miner / Boost - A modular, open public goods baselayer of mining libraries and a pipeline re-using highly reliable components - Enables independent hardening and optimization of sub-components that are reusable standalone sub-systems (onboarding, SDR, posting, readers/writers) - Compatibility with existing and future SP initiatives, including FOC - No lock-in; other teams can build their own operator UX on top and focus on what they do well This approach supports SP retention, lowers integration friction, and preserves long-term ecosystem optionality. The output will be a truly public goods funded baselayer: a modular, underlying set of open source libraries and tools coordinated by a more flexible pipeline architecture, where the underlying libraries can be individually hardened and optimized. It will use pieces of existing Lotus Miner and Boost that work really well, and will be flexible enough to incorporate FOC workflows. This ensures there is a consistent high-quality open set of mining libraries and sub-components that can be standalone and hardened to work very well that anyone can re-use that requires no lock-in. Other teams can build their own operator experience optimizations on top. As a less opinionated stack that reuses many reliable, existing components, this will be easier for SPs to integrate and adapt to their hardware deployments, maintain and upgrade, and whose ease of use and understandability can encourage newer SPs to join the Filecoin network as well as support SP retention. #### 2. Hugo / FOC Hugo's potential FOC Roadmap improvements (to be refined in collaboration with Web3 pod): - Months 6–12 of full-time senior JS engineering contributions in 2026 - Improved interoperability, performance, and developer experience - Production dogfooding and real-world validation of FOC workflows Details of each of Hugo's pillars: 1) Interoperabilty - Supporting move to Curio Markets v2 and better Curio integration - API token infra and payment rails - S3-style Namespacing and API compatability 2) Performance - Improving indexing efficiency (eg. exploring Ponder.sh Filecoin chain integration with Riba) - moving on-chain registries for FOC to off-chain infra - improvements to working with Filecoin blocktime and finality 3) Developer Experience - SDK improvements, docs, templates for "S3 or R2 drop-in replacement" 4) Dev Marketing Engagement - Targeted use case support: AI/ML datasets, backup, immutable compliance data, cross-chain examples 5) Dogfooding Support - Moving Filecoin infrastructure datasets that currently use some form of object storage to FOC: - ChainSafe’s archival CARs, Starboard’s Lily dumps, Zondax’s raw traces, Glif Nodes’ StateMarketDeals.json, FDS videos - Improvements to DX during this process - ENS + Filecoin Pin support for Filecoin dapps 6) Other potential 2026 initiaives as bandwidth allows: - Verifiable streams for object storage - Potential for incremental verification - Smarter client/server and object storage roadmap #### 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto - Continued integration and TSE support - Funded PoCs for paid storage and adoption experiments - Research into demand-side incentives

$300,000 USD

ProPGF Round 1 (H1) - $500,000

$500,000 USD

#### 1. Lotus / Boost Maintenance and Upgrades * Benchmarked performance and reliability improvements * Successful deployment in SP environments * Validation and feedback from multiple SPs * Documentation, blog posts, and continued maintenance * => H2: PiBs managed using this software / framework #### 2. Hugo on FOC * Quarterly OKR and KPIs * Responsiveness to FOC-wg needs * => H2: Clearly scoped and executed FOC product improvement initiatives by Hugo #### 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto * Successful new integrations * Ongoing ecosystem issues addressed * Improvements in infrastructure (RPC, indexers, explorers, data sources, tooling and wallet support, etc.) * Prod deployment and further hardening of ongoing paid deal PoCs and new PoCs * => H2: Value transacted + Gas Fees

For the 3 focus areas outlined above: #### 1. Lotus / Boost Maintenance and Upgrades By keeping reliable software maintained and improving its modularity and re-usability, we keep existing SPs in the Filecoin ecosystem and potentially attract new ones. We also create an architecture where efficiency can be more easily improved, as well as improve its adaptability to support all ecosystem teams working towards improving SP experience. Maintaining and improving reliable, modular mining software: * Retains existing SPs * Lowers integration and operational risk * Enables parallel innovation without fragmentation * Creates a foundation for future efficiency and adoption gains #### 2. Hugo / FOC and 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto FOC improvements and discretionary support further enable builders, integrators, and demand-side experimentation, compounding ecosystem impact over time.

- ≥3 SPs deploy or test modular mining pipeline components within 12 months - ≥4 reusable mining sub-components released with benchmarks and documentation - ≥4 Quarterly OKRs identified by Hugo and delivered in 2026 with associated KPIs - ≥6 ecosystem teams supported via integrations, tooling, or discretionary grants

#### 1. Lotus / Boost Maintenance and Upgrades - Modular outputs reduce long-term maintenance burden - The miner software project is a budget for 1 year of development, adoption efforts, maintenance and support. - A 1 year and highly budget-efficient runway ensures its success and reduces project risks. #### 2. Hugo / FOC - Establishes a 1-year contribution pathway for high-value contributors #### 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto - Discretionary model ensures ongoing timely responsiveness to ecosystem needs

Eva: has managed FilPonto as a TPM and advisor for the past 2 years. She was previously a Startup Operator at PL focusing on Filecoin infrastructure and collaborations for 5 years. Prior to that she had been a Senior UX Developer at the blockchain startup studio ConsenSys since 2015 working on a wide range of projects. She has worked in tech for 22 years, starting out as a developer and has degrees in computer science and human-computer interaction and has helped launch various software projects into production. Hugo: Advanced JS / web3 developer with decades of software engineering experience; lead developer of the Filecoin MetaMask Wallet (FilSnap) in 2023 and also of the iso-filecoin cryptographic library for Filecoin; previously at NFT.storage and on the IPFS JS team for several years at Protocol Labs; deep knowledge of the Filecoin / IPFS stack; open source contributor since 2010. Riba: Long-time Filecoin contributor with deep expertise in Lotus, the Filecoin protocol and large-scale data onboarding; decades of software engineering experience and expert in database systems; dedication to open source and pure public goods. Additional mining software / forward engineer (part-time): recruitment in progress

## Key Risks / Dependencies - Adoption by SPs - Evolving scope and alignment adjustments to FOC roadmap - Flexibility to reallocate funds toward discretionary grants if higher ecosystem impact emerges

[FilPonto ProPGF Proposal - H1](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e2fi0R6NbvAoB8hkf6WtgUzqpMR4mGTvfhrQQBR5WpM/edit?usp=sharing)

FilPonto collaborates with ecosystem stakeholders such as PLFIF, FilOz, Fil-B, Nexus, CEL, the FF and others. By providing technical support and advisory it provides important glue work to keep various teams connected and help new integrators navigate the ecosystem. #### 1. Lotus / Boost Maintenance and Upgrades Recommended: Paul - FF #### 2. Hugo / FOC Recommended: Jenni - FilOz, Tim - FilOz #### 3. Discretionary Grants Pool for FilPonto Recommended: Sarah - Fil-B