We're pleased to announce that Fission has received an $800,000 USD grant to support further applied research of the InterPlanetary Virtual Machine (IPVM) protocols and the Homestar reference implementation from the Arcological Association and the IPFS Network Capital Pool.

To date, IPFS has been a project focused on data. IPVM is a specification for bringing content-addressed execution to content-addressed data on IPFS. To this end, the IPVM standard aims to be the easiest, fastest, most secure, and open way to run decentralized compute jobs everywhere.

IPVM aims to be an open, decentralized, and local-first competitor to AWS Lambda. Execution should scale flexibly from on-device by default all the way up to edge PoPs and data centers.
— Brooklyn Zelenka, Fission CTO & Co-Founder

Over the next 6 to 12 months, this grant will support:

  1. Completing the IPVM standards around linked invocation, deterministic Wasm compute runtime, and computation receipts as part of the IPVM Working Group
  2. Launch of the Homestar reference implementation, a compute provider written in Rust and private, closed beta, and public testnets, and support for the Kubo IPFS node to run compute and data together
  3. Templates for IPVM functions written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly (other requested languages on the roadmap include JavaScript and Python)
  4. Front-end app integration by running decentralized computation directly in a web app

The IPVM Working Group is a bottoms-up, community-led standard. The Homestar node welcomes Rust hackers.

Arcological Swiss Association

The Arcological Association is an innovative fund allocator and supporter of building digital public goods, including stewarding the IPFS Network Capital Pool that was the source of this grant from Protocol Labs. Thank you for your support!

Fission is building a full identity, data, and compute stack for edge networks and local first applications. We've shipped UCAN for capabilities-based authorization, WNFS for encrypted and capability-based file storage, and IPVM completes the stack with decentralized computation.

Hiring for Homestar

With this funding, we're growing the Homestar team. We'll initially be adding one more full-time software engineer to work on the Homestar reference implementation of the IPVM, written in Rust and focused on the execution of decentralized WebAssembly functions.

Update: we are pausing the hiring process for this role right now. Thank you for your interest!