Mirrored from filpgf.io — ProPGF Batch 3 (Karma program 1479, application 6a397f1acd23fdff60cdc7bd, status: pending). Contact details redacted; canonical application lives on filpgf.io. 1.1 Project Name IPNI: Interplanetary Network Indexer 1.2 Project Github https://www.github.com/ipni 1.3 Project Website https://www.cid.contact 1.4 Team Lead/Point of Contact Alex Firmani, General Manager 1.5 Category [ "Core Infrastructure" ] 1.6 Open Source Status Fully Open Source 2.1 Project Summary The InterPlanetary Network Indexer (IPNI) is the content routing layer for the Filecoin and IPFS ecosystems. It maintains a global index mapping content identifiers to the storage providers that hold them, and answers low-latency lookup queries from retrieval clients, gateways, and on-ramps. Storage providers publish signed advertisements of their content; IPNI ingests those advertisements and serves billions of lookups per month. This grant funds six months of continued operation and forward development of IPNI, structured around a single strategic objective: making the paid publisher tier deliverable and sellable. The prior ProPGF Financial Federation Design grant (batch 2) concluded that paid tiers are the credible path to IPNI's financial sustainability. This batch funds the engineering work that turns that design into a real capability and revenue streams. The engineering scope is the Ingest v2 workstream: sync-on-announce scheduling plus a dedicated paid-tier ingest lane on existing unused hardware (M1), followed by cache invalidation infrastructure at the edge for paid-tier publishers (M2). Together these two milestones deliver end-to-end web-speed ingest latency (target: one to three seconds from publish to queryable) as a contractually-measurable capability for paying customers. The new paid tier is an additive capability built on engineering investment, not a paywall on previously free features. 2.2 Who does this work support? [ "Storage Providers", "Application Builders", "Network Infrastructure", "Onramps" ] 2.3 Total Funding Requested (USD) $280,000 2.4 Milestones & Budget [ { "title": "Paid-Tier Ingest: Sync-on-Announce + Dedicated Lane", "description": "Build immediate sync-on-announce for paid publishers and route their ingest to a dedicated lane on existing unused SF hardware. Target ingest latency of one to three seconds for paid publishers, with the free tier continuing on the current shared path.", "dueDate": "2026-06-22", "fundingRequested": "$55,000", "completionCriteria": "Not Provided" }, { "title": "Paid-Tier Cache Invalidation", "description": "Flush stale 404 entries from the edge cache when paid publishers ingest new content. Without this, the M1 latency gains are wiped out by negative-cache TTLs at the CDN.", "dueDate": "2026-06-22", "fundingRequested": "$55,000", "completionCriteria": "Not Provided" }, { "title": "GM Coordination & Stakeholder Management", "description": "General Manager function across the six months. Roadmap, partner and ecosystem coordination, engineering oversight, grant reporting, and federation onboarding prep.", "dueDate": "2026-06-22", "fundingRequested": "$60,000", "completionCriteria": "Not Provided" }, { "title": "Paid-Tier Pricing Framework & Calibration", "description": "Calibration conversations with at least five large publishers, then a published pricing framework and draft SLA for the paid tier.", "dueDate": "2026-06-22", "fundingRequested": "$30,000", "completionCriteria": "Not provided" }, { "title": "Sustainability Plan & 6-Month Check-in", "description": "The formal sustainability deliverable and 6-month check-in report for ProPGF. Updated sustainability plan, revenue-share model, and the shape of the next funding cycle.", "dueDate": "2026-06-22", "fundingRequested": "$20,000", "completionCriteria": "Not provided" }, { "title": "Technical Advisor", "description": "Retained advisory at $3K/month covering architectural input, protocol guidance, and datacenter labor on the SF rack.", "dueDate": "2026-06-22", "fundingRequested": "$18,000", "completionCriteria": "Not provided" }, { "title": "Operational Upkeep, Datacenter & External Services", "description": "Rack costs in San Francisco, disk replacements and incidental hardware, Cloudflare, monitoring tooling, and other recurring services.", "dueDate": "2026-06-22", "fundingRequested": "$42,000", "completionCriteria": "Not provided" } ] 3.1 Impact pathway Not Provided 3.2 Verification metrics Not Provided 3.3 References Not Provided 4.1 Monthly Operating Burn [ "$10-$100K (small team)" ] 4.2 What % of total team monthly burn depends on this grant? 100% 4.3 If this grant is not awarded, what happens? Not Provided 4.4 Core Team Not Provided 4.5 Has your team received a ProPGF grant or funding from PLFIF before? [ "Yes" ] 5.1 Key risks & dependencies The most material risk to this grant's outcomes is publisher adoption of the paid tier. The value of that capability depends on at least a few large publishers signing on as paying customers. Single-engineer dependency is a structural risk. IPNI's engineering roadmap currently runs through one full-time software engineer; the project has limited upkeep time designated to the storetheindex codebase and related libraries. The infrastructure operational model carries structural debt. The current setup depends on bare-metal hardware co-located in a rack sub-leased through the technical advisor, with the advisor providing physical labor for hardware maintenance. This arrangement is functional but is not how IPNI's infrastructure would be built today, and creates a single-point dependency on one advisor's continued availability. The project intends to evaluate restructuring options (direct datacenter lease, managed colo, or selective cloud migration) in a future grant cycle. This grant funds continued operation of the current arrangement at fair market advisory rates while that evaluation is scoped. Any feedback you have on the application process? Not provided Anything else you want to share that we didn't ask? Not provided Contributing to Core Infrastructure? IPNI is the content routing layer for the Filecoin and IPFS ecosystems. It answers “who has this piece of content” by maintaining a global index that maps content identifiers (CIDs) to storage providers (SPs). For any use of Filecoin as a retrieval network, a client must first discover which provider holds the requested content. The DHT does not scale to the content footprint of large Filecoin providers, so those providers, and the integrations built on top of them, depend on IPNI. Direct dependents today include Spark (retrieval checking), IPFS gateway operators, Storacha, Curio, and on-ramps bridging IPFS and Filecoin. Objective 1 Indirect Objective 2 Indirect Objective 3 Indirect Open Source Context N/A