What is Fund Ring?
Fund Ring is a Web3 funding primitive that seeks to help Filecoin and IPFS-connected open source projects get long-term support for maintenance, security, and feature updates with monthly or annual funding.
When you join Fund Ring as a supporter or a maintainer, you join a broad community of FLOSS projects. It’s like a good ol’ fashioned web ring for funding projects you rely on.
Supporters can contribute to Fund Ring projects by selecting "Fund the Ring" in the app and connecting any EVM-compatible wallet that allows users to add the custom FEVM network, such as MetaMask. Whenever a supporter decides to "Fund the Ring," the contributed FIL (less the gas fees) is deposited into the verified project wallet.
Open source maintainers join the ring by visiting the Fund Ring app, verifying the ownership of their Git repo with a funding proof, and deploying their own contract. We created a Fund Ring widget that the user can embed on their app's page to solicit contributions for their specific project. Only the contract owner, who has also verified that they have commit access to the Git repo, can withdraw the funds.
As a maintainer, let the ecosystem know what you need on a monthly or annual basis so you can dedicate the time to keep code maintained and secure. Run one-off campaigns to support new features.
Watch Fund Ring creator and Fission engineer Andy take us through the Fund Ring demo:
Why Build Fund Ring?
While we love Open Collective and are an active fiscal sponsor and contributor on their platform, we wanted to create a solution designed with Web3 audiences in mind. One where a contributor can switch between FIL, ETH, Matic, and more to fund their favorite projects and get their own projects funded as well.
We wanted to create a self-sustaining and distributed option that empowers developers to get recurring funding on a monthly or annual basis that helps with long-term maintenance.
As well, much like Open Collective enables projects to send funds to other projects, we see a ring of projects promoting and funding each other.
Test the Ring
Fund Ring is available on Filecoin Calibration Testnet. As we gather more feedback and onboard various projects, we will transition to Filecoin Mainnet.
- As a project owner, register your project, sign and commit your funding proof to Git, and ask supporters to fund with sweet sweet testnet tFIL.
- As an ecosystem supporter, get some testnet tokens from the faucet, and fund some projects. You can try this by funding the Fund Ring itself.
Future Plans
Some of the upcoming features and ideas include:
- Support for native FIL accounts: Use Filsnap, Brave, or other native Filecoin wallets to fund (🗓 planned)
- Filecoin vesting support: Use the built-in vesting features to send FIL over a month or year (💡 idea)
- Filecoin multisig: Use the built-in Filecoin multisig (💡 idea)
- Split support for dependencies: Show other projects in your funding widget, and allocate sending a percentage of funds to a ring of projects (💡 idea)
There are many other ideas to layer on top of these basic contracts and on-chain events. For example, you could aggregate projects and allocate funds across them, present a UI for stack ranking or voting, or as an individual, create a project where you curate projects in a ring and help gather funds that go to all of them directly!
Explore the GitHub repo to get involved with Fund Ring, or drop by the #shared-fission channel in the Filecoin Slack. We'd love to hear your questions or comments!