This proposal is a continuation of the two-year roadmap outlined in Batch 1. As that proposal stated: "this is a 1-2 year roadmap - we do not expect to fully complete these lines of work in this 6 month period, and expect to return with a similar funding request in 6 months."
We are now at that six-month point, and the situation has evolved in ways we anticipated and ways we did not.
What we anticipated: The ProPGF Committee's recommendations outlined a transition plan such that "Masih and Will can be locked out for 2 weeks in June 2026 with no risk to the system." This was always the goal—IPNI needed to reduce its dependence on its founding maintainers.
What we did not anticipate: That transition is now happening ahead of schedule. Current team members have indicated they wish to step back from the project; an interim group is now working to transition to a new team, which will include one senior SWE, one junior SWE, and a General Manager, with more direct operational and management support from Filecoin Foundation, IPFS Foundation, and PLFIF.
Where we are on Batch 1 work: Service has been restored and is running, but primarily through stopgaps to ensure service for key stakeholders rather than needed re-engineering. Most team effort has gone to hardware repair and keeping the service up, rather than the deeper engineering work. Two milestones (Car mirror, Per-provider metering) remain in progress and will require the onboarding of new engineering capacity to complete.
What this proposal requests:
A no-cost extension for the 2nd and 3rd engineering milestones still in progress.
Continuation funding for the leadership transition (completing the hiring process for senior SWE, initiating the search for a fulltime General Manager).
Funding technical and stakeholder research phases to design and implement major improvements to IPNI.
Continued operational support.
This matters for Filecoin because content discovery depends on IPNI's routing. Most significantly, the Filecoin Onchain Cloud has leant into IPFS provision with Fil Pin, which depends on IPNI for SP content discovery on IPFS mainnet. IPNI also supports retrieval checking infrastructure used for Fil+ qualification. If IPNI degrades, Filecoin's ability to serve content to the broader IPFS network is compromised.
Beyond this ProPGF round, our longer-term goal (target end of 2026) remains: IPNI operating as federated infrastructure with multiple operators, costs shared by usage, and no single entity dependency.