Back in November 2023, Protocol Labs (initial creators and incubators of IPFS) announced plans for IPFS and libp2p to officially take big steps forward in project maturity, with independent foundations and funding structures.
This thread aims to provide updates on this transition, as well as a catch-all for discussion and questions!
The IPFS protocol continues to improve in the open, via the IPIP process and lots of review and discussion in the Implementers WG. This month, clarifications were added to gateways and web-redirects.
2 new working groups. IPFS DApps WG is for those interested in making the experience of IPFS DApps better, whether via improving IPFS implementations or building other tooling. IPFS Communications WG is focused on overseeing project comms channels and content.
Congrats to Shipyard! They are a newly independent engineering team of longtime IPFS and libp2p experts. In addition to maintaining popular projects such as Kubo, Helia, ProbeLab, and the ipfs.io gateway, they’re also offering consulting and support on related topics.
The legal entity for the foundation has been created! Many details of governance and composition need to be figured out before it’s operational.
As part of the push towards independent project funding structures, IPFS now has an independent IPFS Core cell via the Open Impact Foundation.
These are just the highlights, more work continues in the background. Feel free to drop any questions or comments in this thread. Throughout the transition process, I’ll aim to update here once a month at minimum.