Fission is winding down active operations. The team is wrapping things up and ending employment and contractor status by the end of May 2024.
Fission has been a venture investment funded company since 2019. Our last round, led by Protocol Labs, was raised as part of joining the Protocol Labs network as a “blue team”, focused on protocol research and implementation. The hypothesis was to get paid by the network, including in Filecoin FIL grants for alignment with the network.
In Q4 of 2023, it was clear that our hypothesis of getting paid directly for protocol research wasn’t going to work.
We did a round of lay offs and focused on productizing our compute stack, powered by the IPVM protocol, as the Everywhere Computer. The team has shipped this as a working decentralized, content-addressable compute system in the past 6 months.
Unfortunately, we have not been able to find further venture fundraising that is a match for us.
What about the projects that Fission works on?
The majority of Fission’s code is available under open source licenses. The protocols we’ve worked on have been developed in working groups, with a community of other collaborators, and have their home base in shared Github organizations:
- UCAN: capability-based decentralized auth using DIDs https://github.com/ucan-wg
- WNFS: encrypted file system https://github.com/wnfs-wg
- IPVM: content-addressable compute https://github.com/ipvm-wg
Various people on the team, as well as other people and organizations, continue to build on the open source code we’ve developed.
Fission does have active publishing and DNS infrastructure that we'll be winding down, and will be reaching out to people about timing for that.
Thanks
Thank you to everyone for your support, interest, and collaboration over the years. Many of us have been involved in protocols and open source implementations for a long time, and have seen them have impact far after they were first created. We're proud of the identity, data, and compute stack we developed, and hope to see them have continued growth across different ecosystems.