HackFS — Showcasing the winning Textile projects
What an exciting month HackFS has given us at Textile. Throughout the month, we’ve been working non-stop to support and push many different teams around the world to build the next wave of great tools and products on IPFS and Filecoin. The event just wrapped, prizes have been awarded, and teams are starting to plan their next steps.
We wanted to take a moment and highlight a few of the Textile prize winners and share some of our thoughts on why they were special. We won't go over all the prize winners, but here are all the Textile winners.
In our own mission to bring early adoption to Filecoin, we spend time thinking about what markets of data creators and consumers could get benefit from the network. Pygate is a new set of Python tools to leverage Filecoin(and IPFS) networks via Powergate. Python is one of the most popular languages around, and more importantly, it’s the tool of choice for many of the world’s data scientists. For us, Pygate represents a new way for us to think about solutions for this group of users with obvious data requirements 🥇.
How did they do it? Pygate was built using Powergate’s gRPC bindings for Python. The Pygate team exposed those APIs in an easy to use client for Python. They went a step further to support a broader Python developer community by providing a Flask based API as well.
Deploy for Java & Decentralized Docker Hub
We love seeing these developer tool & infrastructure solutions being built on Textile, IPFS, and Filecoin. There is obvious value to gain, including the classics such as verifiability, resiliency, disintermediation. We also believe many new and unknown services waiting to be built from these primitives. Deploy for Java plugged Java package publication and distribution into the IPFS and Filecoin networks. Decentralized Docker Hub plugged Docker image publication into IPFS and Filecoin network and added ENS names for version control and discovery. Extra points for taking a natural use-case that is hard to build and successfully making it look natural again 🙂.
How did they do it? Each of the above projects took a slightly different approach. Deploy for Java built on Textile Buckets, using the multi-protocol interoperability of Buckets to create verifiable content address for each release + Filecoin archiving for long-term persistence.
Kazan
We've seen an emerging pattern in new applications built in the space that is still hard for us to put the finger on. The pattern includes apps that allow loose collectives of individuals to collaborate freely on data, where any individual may want to copy, maintain, improve, or protect the data for some time. Kazan fit that bill, so we were familiar with the theme. What got us excited about Kazan was the topic and data model: Kazan is for music tracks to be composed together by individual performers, asynchronously collaborating, to jam. It’s not a use-case have seen anyone building before, but“git for jamming” sounds like something we want to exist in the world.
How did they do it? Kazan was a well thought out idea before HackFS started. The sole-contributor sketched out possible architectures, blogging about intentions, and talked with other performers to see if the product would be used. At HackFS, a basic MVP was built that uses Buckets plus Filecoin to make individual track layers available to the network of musicians. Provenance and attribution baked into the data model.
Conclusions
Too many great projects to highlight, but definitely browse the entire HackFS showcase. We hope to see a bunch of them join us over the next months at both Apollo and the Filecoin Launchpad.
Showcase
Pygate
Deploy for Java & Decentralized Docker Hub
Kazan
Conclusions