FFDW 2025 Annual Report

Welcoming the Decentralized Web

Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) is the sister nonprofit of Filecoin Foundation. FFDW is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to preserving humanity’s most important information and supporting the development and adoption of decentralized technologies. While Filecoin Foundation stewards the Filecoin network’s future, FFDW promotes the broader development of the decentralized web (DWeb).

FFDW’s work includes supporting open source software and protocols that safeguard critical data from centralized control and single points of failure. FFDW also empowers institutions to preserve vulnerable information by leveraging the resilience of decentralized storage.

FFDW’s work in 2025 showcases the benefits of decentralized technology at a moment of growing interest in and adoption of the decentralized web, including the preservation of more than 1,000,000 cultural artifacts on the Filecoin network.

In this report, you’ll see the progress achieved by FFDW and our exceptional roster of project partners over the last year.

FFDW’s Impact Areas

FFDW’s efforts span the critical areas listed below. Each of these domains is vital in its own right, and FFDW’s breadth of work reflects its commitment to driving meaningful change not just in one industry but across the expanse of the web.

DWeb Research and Development: FFDW supports initiatives that advance decentralized technologies.
Education: FFDW champions initiatives that increase education and understanding of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and other decentralized technologies.
Human Rights: Records of the fight for human rights can be some of the most vulnerable data in the world –– susceptible to tampering or total disappearance on unsecured platforms. FFDW’s work with human rights organizations is dedicated to safeguarding this critical data.
Cultural Preservation: The world’s digital artifacts are fragile –– many at risk of disappearing forever. FFDW’s work in the area of cultural preservation aims to preserve and safeguard humanity’s digital cultural heritage for the long term.
Government Datasets and Policy: FFDW educates policymakers about the promise of decentralized technologies and works to preserve government data using decentralized technologies like the Filecoin network.
Science and Environment: Scientific research produces large amounts of data, but there are limited systems in place to preserve this information publicly and for the long term. FFDW is working with universities and other scientific institutions to preserve scientific data by leveraging the reliability of decentralized storage.

Impact Areas

DWeb Research and Development

Distributed Press

Distributed Press is a free and open source tool for publishing text and other multimedia works to the DWeb. Distributed Press creates beginner-friendly, open source publishing tools that offer creators an alternative to centralized publishing platforms. With FFDW’s support, Distributed Press has built a user-friendly, DWeb-native, no-code publishing platform that is both scalable and easy to adopt. The project automates the publishing and hosting of content using decentralized protocols like IPFS and Hypercore through the Sutty content management system. It also adds social features to websites by integrating with the Fediverse using ActivityPub. Over 100 websites use this platform to host content on the DWeb.

Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School

As a specialized lab within Harvard Law School, the Library Innovation Lab (LIL) explores new ways for libraries to share knowledge through technology. FFDW’s support of the Democratizing Open Knowledge program is focused on enhancing discovery and engagement with open data and exploring new ways to preserve digital information.

In 2025, LIL significantly advanced its Public Data Project, expanding its stewardship of governmental datasets. This work included incorporating Smithsonian Collections data and developing new discovery tools for preserved Data.gov archives, enabling researchers, librarians, and digital humanists to access and explore critical federal datasets. In parallel, LIL published research rethinking data discovery for long-term scholarship and continued its leadership in web archiving through tools such as Scoop and perma.cc, which prevent link rot by preserving digital sources through a distributed network of library partners.

Rust Foundation

FFDW is a member of the Rust Foundation, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to stewarding the Rust programming language, nurturing the Rust ecosystem, and supporting the global community of maintainers governing and developing the open source project.

Spritely

Decentralized storage focuses not just on storing data but also on enabling methods to authorize access to and process information without relying on centralized brokers or gatekeepers. Spritely is a nonprofit innovating in areas ranging from decentralized identity and social networks to encrypted and portable storage.

Two of Spritely’s core projects are Spritely Goblins and OCapN, the Object Capability Network. Spritely Goblins is a library and toolkit designed to make secure, distributed programming the default. Since its initial release, the team has shipped implementations across multiple programming languages: Racket and Guile. OCapN is the powerful protocol behind Spritely’s distributed object programming. OCapN is a standard that enables decentralized services to link together securely and share processes, identities, and data. This ambitious, multi-year project aims to enable DWeb to interconnect and share resources in a way that centralized tools cannot. Additionally, in 2025, the Spritely Institute engaged global audiences through multiple talks on decentralized web infrastructure, secure software design, and the role of public-interest technology in building a resilient web.

Education

The Center for Law Tech and Social Good (CLTSG) at the University of San Francisco School of Law is an academic center and training ground for the next generation of lawyers, lawmakers and policy-enforcers to think about technology, society, and the law in a balanced way. As part of this mission, the Center has conducted over two dozen government trainings –– diving into decentralization and demystifying encryption, blockchain, cryptocurrency, DAOs, and more. Examples of government agencies that have received these trainings include the National Association of Attorneys General, executive staff of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the Federal Public Defender, and California legislative aides.

In parallel to its government training work, the Center hosted several events focused on timely policy topics at the intersection of law and emerging technology, including a Blockchain 101 event for the USF community, in collaboration with the “Women in Technology” Computer Science Student Organization; the Blockchain Law Student Symposium; and a lunch & learn on “The Role of Emerging Tech in an Election Year.”

Additionally, CLTSG launched the FFDW International Affiliated Scholars (IAS) Program to bridge global academic communities pursuing research at the nexus of blockchain technology and the law. The cohort includes blockchain leaders from Denmark, Rwanda, Brazil, and Ecuador who are exploring how emerging technology might solve issues relevant to their communities. For example, in early 2025 the Center hosted an international webinar titled “The Social Impact of Emerging Technology in Latin America: A conversation with Professor María Belén Albornoz." An FFDW Teaching Fellow helped bring emerging technology into the law school classroom with a second year offering of the “DeFi and the Law” course, as well as publishing the Blockchain Legislative Definitions (BLD) Project Report.

Gray Area

Gray Area is a San Francisco-based nonprofit counterculture hub with a mission to cultivate, sustain, and amplify a community of creative practitioners at the intersection of culture and technology. Gray Area and FFDW worked together to develop the DWeb for Creators course to help creators incorporate DWeb technology into their work. As part of this collaboration, Gray Area has brought together a team of internationally recognized artists, technologists, and museum professionals to design an open source curriculum to empower anyone with free access to use, modify, adapt, and distribute the content.

In 2025, the course included 16 sessions over eight weeks, combining weekly knowledge sessions and hands-on praxis workshops. Two new instructor-selected technical modules—on self-hosting web services and decentralized social media—were added this year. Instructors also held office hours to support student projects and deepen engagement beyond class sessions.

The cohort included 31 interdisciplinary students from 11 countries, with participants from TechSoup’s Cultural Memory Lab joining the program.

TechSoup

TechSoup equips changemakers worldwide with access to solutions and strategies, skills development, and peer-to-peer community support that help them better use technology more effectively to make their organizations more flexible and resilient in the face of today’s global challenges. Last year, TechSoup supported over 300,000 organizations across the world.

TechSoup continued to develop Accelerating Makers, a DWeb education hub designed to help early career civil society makers explore and develop potential use cases for decentralized technologies, then build and integrate decentralized applications into the civil society tech stack. Insights from this program inspired the launch of the Cultural Memory Lab in 2025, a hands-on, cohort-based incubator to empower libraries, museums, community archives, and other cultural organizations to put their learnings on decentralized technology and storage into practice.

Projects that received support and FFDW mentorship to explore applications of decentralized tools for cultural memory work included: {B/qKC}: A Black Queer Archive, SURCO Oaxaca’s Decentralized Archiving of Zapotec Biocultural Knowledge, The Mobility Independence Foundation’s Open-Source Online Repository of mobility aid designs, and the Myanmar Internet Project’s documentation of human rights infractions by the Junta. Project leads were also able to participate in the Dweb for Creators Course, run by FFDW partner Gray Area, to further their knowledge and education through scholarships.

You can learn more about the cohort participants and their innovative use of IPFS by watching our highlights reel, or use and adapt the Cultural Memory Lab’s learning materials, which are published on GitHub with an open license.

Human Rights

Fasila

FFDW partnered with Fasila to preserve critical journalism by supporting more than 20 journalists and archiving important reporting and associated digital records. These materials are stored on the Filecoin network and made accessible via IPFS through Fasila’s Alive-In archive, protecting them from loss, censorship, and technological failure. The project presents the archived stories on a dedicated, metadata-rich platform that supports discovery and use by journalists, researchers, educators, and filmmakers, demonstrating a replicable model for safeguarding cultural memory through decentralized storage.

Freedom of the Press Foundation

FFDW’s work with the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) supports infrastructure, user experience, and security enhancements for decentralized tools used by journalists around the globe. This collaboration has led to the design of a novel zero-trust architecture for SecureDrop, an open source news and information submission system used by newsrooms worldwide for secure document exchange and communication between journalists and anonymous sources. FFDW’s work with FPF also advances FPF’s efforts to preserve historically critical information, such as its comprehensive database of press freedom violations in the United States and other government data that belongs in the public sphere.

Guardian Project

Guardian Project is a global collective of software developers, designers, advocates, activists, and trainers who develop free, open source software focused on security and privacy enhancing features. Their free software is built from the ground up to support the DWeb and decentralized design and principles.

Guardian Project has integrated decentralized storage into its suite of privacy-focused, open source mobile applications and software libraries, including Proofmode and F-Droid. The FFDW collaboration aims to expand access to these technologies for human rights defenders, journalists, and activists worldwide as part of the Guardian Project's ongoing commitment to empowering individuals and communities against human rights abuses.

Guardian Project's Proofmode app uses decentralized technologies to authenticate and verify “eyewitness” content captured on smartphones through cryptographic signatures and metadata. Proofmode’s integration of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication (C2PA) standard enables open, interoperable support for the creation, embedding, and storage of cryptographically verifiable claims, attestations, and manifests in digital media. This provides an open, interoperable, decentralized chain of provenance and authenticity for photos and videos captured or imported through Proofmode applications, SDKs, and services.

Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG)

HRDAG has been turning raw human rights data into usable findings for nearly 30 years. The collaboration between FFDW and HRDAG focuses on outreach to and research with human rights organizations across the globe to explore how and when storing and accessing data on the DWeb may benefit their work. HRDAG is using the Filecoin network and IPFS to store multiple critical human rights datasets. In 2025, HRDAG worked with its partner DataCívica and FFDW to upload and test large-scale human rights datasets on IPFS and Filecoin, building on earlier preservation work tied to truth and accountability efforts in Latin America.

OpenArchive

OpenArchive is a nonprofit initiative committed to protecting our histories to advance human rights. Working at the intersection of ethics, responsible technology, journalism, and archival science, they co-create privacy-first, decentralized, easy-to-use archiving tools and resources. Their flagship app, Save helps people securely archive, verify, and encrypt their evidentiary mobile media.

In collaboration with FFDW and Hypha Worker Cooperative, OpenArchive is implementing decentralized backends into the Save app, including Filecoin and their novel p2p secure ‘DWeb Storage’ backend to enhance verification, redundancy, and provenance of media evidence. This work enables people to preserve their mobile media directly from their phones to redundant, decentralized storage, which offers improved preservation, provenance, and long-term access.

Starling Lab

In 2025, Starling Lab expanded its academic and institutional work, delivering another iteration of its expanded Stanford course and contributing thought leadership to global conversations on AI, authenticity, and journalism. The Lab also deepened its applied preservation work by supporting major investigations such as Sanctions, Scams, and Deepfakes and onboarding collections through the USC Digital Repository and its newly operational Filecoin node, including U.S. declassified battle damage assessments tied to claims of more than 1,500 civilian casualties and photogrammetric and 3D scans of Armenian heritage sites in Nagorno-Karabakh that are at risk of degradation.

WITNESS

WITNESS is an international nonprofit organization that helps people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. Amid the rapid evolution of generative AI and synthetic media, FFDW and WITNESS are working together to secure the next generation of trustworthy human rights information by creating, preserving, and protecting human rights documentation and other public-interest information. To support critical human rights efforts, WITNESS is helping frontline information actors adopt beneficial AI tools and tactics, reimagine how to communicate the truth within an AI-mediated information ecosystem, directly resist harmful impacts of AI on trust; and proactively shape AI development and regulation to protect democratic values and human rights.

Cultural Preservation

Digital Public Library of America

In 2025, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) stored over 20,000 files on the Filecon network in collaboration with FFDW, preserving a selection of data at risk of loss and sharing results with its national member community. DPLA then hosted a webinar and posted a blog post to build practical understanding of decentralized web storage and its potential to strengthen long-term access and resilience of cultural heritage materials.

Flickr Foundation

FFDW provided funding to launch a new cultural organization, Flickr Foundation, to develop and sustain a social and technical infrastructure to steward the invaluable Flickr collection for future generations. The nonprofit is striving to ensure this treasure remains available for people to contribute to, learn from, and enjoy for the next 100 years.

In 2025, the team launched Data Lifeboat, demonstrating how decentralized methodology can underpin the longevity of such an enormous system. The Data Lifeboat service empowers Flickr members to create portable, browsable archives that preserve photos alongside their rich social metadata, capturing the conversations and community context that give images meaning.

MIT Open Learning

MIT Open Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is transforming teaching and learning through the innovative use of digital technologies. MIT Open Learning makes educational resources and courses available to learners around the globe.

With FFDW’s support, Open Learning is exploring how decentralized technology can bolster its programs, including MIT OpenCourseWare . A core component of FFDW’s work with Open Learning is exploring avenues to utilize IPFS and the Filecoin network to store and distribute OpenCourseWare content. This could enable broader access to OpenCourseWare’s more than 2,500 MIT courses that have reached more than 500 million people worldwide since the program launched in 2002.

MuckRock

MuckRock is a vital resource for public records requests on the local, state, and federal levels; a collaborative news site; and a long-term store for the data behind the news, backed up on IPFS and Filecoin.

MuckRock integrated IPFS and Filecoin into DocumentCloud, a platform hosting over 5.5 million verified documents. To date, over 1.34 million documents including those from newsrooms, nonprofits, and researchers have been uploaded to the Filecoin network through this collaboration.

Over the course of its collaboration with FFDW, MuckRock deepened its community engagement and platform integrations, producing the Archiving Government Data event with other FFDW partners that drew nearly 1,000 attendees and publishing multiple case studies highlighting how users are leveraging automation and decentralized storage for long-term access. In parallel, MuckRock integrated IPFS and Filecoin publishing into new DocumentCloud add-ons, driving adoption to the point that roughly 20% of all public DocumentCloud documents are now archived on IPFS and Filecoin.

Prelinger Archives

The Prelinger Archives is digitizing and preserving a vast collection of archival 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film footage to further its mission to make rare and one-of-a-kind films, especially films by and about members of underrepresented communities, accessible to the public.

Prelinger Archives has scanned nearly 7.5 million feet and over 15,000 films. Prelinger Archives’ collaboration with FFDW explores methods for uploading and accessing motion picture datasets to the Filecoin network at scale, with over 1,500 films uploaded.

Rohingya Project

Rohingya Project champions stateless Rohingya, using blockchain-based technologies to equip them with a virtual community that can encourage collaboration and entrepreneurship. FFDW’s collaboration with Rohingya Project supports digitization and archiving efforts to preserve the collective identity of the Rohingya –– safeguarding cultural artifacts for education, research, community building, and advocacy purposes –– along with the use of decentralized technologies such as Filecoin to advance the project’s mission. Digitized cultural artifacts have been cataloged within the Internet Archive’s repository and stored on Filecoin. Rohingya Project is also training Rohingya youth on decentralized archival methods.

Shift Collective

Shift Collective is a non-profit consulting and design group that helps organizations better engage, collaborate with, and reflect their local communities. FFDW’s support enables Shift to explore decentralized storage solutions for Historypin.org and map the ethical and material digital storage needs of community-based archives. This includes work to build a pilot storage network in collaboration with institutional and community archive partners. In 2025, Shift Collective and its partners designed a prototype for community-centered, decentralized storage that is also ethical, autonomous, and sustainable: https://github.com/Historypin/community-cloud-storage.

Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. The Smithsonian seeks to shape the future by preserving heritage, discovering new knowledge, and sharing resources with the world.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is working with FFDW to upload nearly 200 digitized sound recordings from Alexander Graham Bell to IPFS and Filecoin. Famous for patenting the first practical telephone in 1876, Bell also pioneered recorded sound. Experimental recordings from his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., dating from 1881 to 1889, are some of the earliest recordings ever made. The surviving collection of about 300 records was considered unplayable until new technologies in the 21st century made it possible to hear them. The project team is in the process of revamping the Hear My Voice exhibition page, where CIDs will enable the public to access recordings at home.

TRANSFER Data Trust

TRANSFER Data Trust is a decentralized, artist-owned archive and cooperative value exchange network for time-based media art. FFDW’s collaboration with TRANSFER brings 10 years of new media and virtual artworks across five studios onto the Filecoin network. The Data Trust is a proof-of-concept prototype of open culture infrastructure for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.

Government Datasets and Policy

Authors Alliance

Authors Alliance seeks to advance the interests of authors who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly. The Alliance creates resources to help authors understand and exercise their rights while championing policies that make knowledge and culture more available and discoverable. FFDW supports the Alliance in its work to address restrictions on preservation and access to knowledge, especially those concerning limitations on new technological use cases.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping build and sustain a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture online. As part of its work, CC helps overcome legal obstacles to knowledge sharing and creativity to address the world’s most pressing challenges. FFDW promotes CC’s work through financial support, technical advising, and communications amplification. CC was also recently recognized as an official NGO partner to UNESCO.

Democracy’s Library

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library that has archived the web for decades and preserves other cultural artifacts in digital form. Democracy’s Library is an Internet Archive focused on preserving government research and publications from around the world. Since 2022, FFDW has supported the Democracy’s Library project, which has also received funding from Filecoin Foundation.

As the Democracy’s Library collection grows, the initiative is reaching beyond its initial focus on the preservation and accessibility of U.S. and Canadian government documents, including uploading collections to the Filecoin network. Over the course of this collaboration, Democracy’s Library has uploaded multiple PiBs of valuable public data from a range of government sources. In addition, the project is exploring how it can empower countries that are currently under-resourced for public digital record keeping.

POPVOX Foundation

FFDW launched a partnership with POPVOX Foundation in support of the Digital Parliaments Project to help modernize and preserve legislative records, transitioning away from paper-based systems to interactive digital archives in collaboration with the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library. The program builds local capacity in digital governance and data management through in-country training and knowledge sharing, supported by a regional community of practice that provides ongoing technical and advisory support for sustainable use of the digital ecosystem.

Fight for the Future

Fight for the Future (FFtF) is an activist group focused on digital rights. Through its collaboration with FFDW, FFtF advocates for human rights-centered technology regulations and frameworks to promote data privacy, the right to code, and the preservation and distribution of knowledge and culture. Additionally, the project organizes and support privacy-preserving financial and data systems in new constituencies.

Foundation for American Innovation

Foundation for American Innovation’s (FAI) mission is to develop technology, talent, and ideas that champion a better, freer, and more abundant future. FFDW works with FAI to inform and educate American policymakers and leaders on the benefits and values of open, decentralized technologies. The project seeks to bridge the divide between the tech and policy communities through coalition building, educational outreach, translational research, and both in-person and online events.

Public Knowledge

Public Knowledge is a nonprofit organization shaping policy to promote freedom of expression, an open internet, and access to technology for the public good. FFDW supported the 2025 Emerging Tech Conference that convened industry leaders, policymakers, innovators, researchers, and technologists to exchange ideas and learn about cutting-edge technology, including the DWeb.

TechCongress

TechCongress is an organization that provides one-year fellowships to bridge the informational gap between technologists and policymakers in Congress by placing technologists on Capitol Hill to serve as Congressional technology advisors. Funding from FFDW has supported fellowship participation, with technologists placed in offices including Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY); Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR); the Senate Finance Committee; the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee; and other Congressional offices.

Science and Environment

Earth Species Project

Earth Species Project (ESP) is a nonprofit at the frontier of interspecies understanding. They decode animal communication with advanced AI to illuminate the diverse intelligences on earth. ESP is building open-access machine learning models and tools to assist researchers as they endeavor to make meaning of their data.

In 2025, ESP uploaded its BEANS-Zero benchmark dataset to the Filecoin network to ensure resilient global access for evaluating zero-shot bioacoustics tasks. The benchmark was originally introduced to evaluate NatureLM-audio, the first audio-language foundation model designed specifically for animal sounds. This work demonstrates how decentralized storage can directly support open science and bioacoustics research.

The EASIER Data Initiative

The EASIER Data Initiative at the University of Maryland leverages decentralized storage technologies, including Filecoin and IPFS, to transform data access and computation in the geospatial field.

In 2025, the EASIER Data Initiative advanced the use of Filecoin and IPFS as practical infrastructure for geospatial science, focusing on reliable preservation and access to high-value Earth observation data. The team prepared and made available multiple real-world datasets through decentralized storage, including GEDI tutorial data, crop classification training data, and climate research artifacts, and shared lessons from this work through updated tutorials, published use cases, and community convenings that connect open science with decentralized data stewardship.

Looking Forward

We invite you to join us as FFDW continues to work toward broader DWeb adoption and development. Whether by engaging with our ongoing projects or staying informed about our efforts, the community’s involvement is crucial to building a robust and decentralized web. Together, we can shape a more interconnected and empowered digital future.