OpenWeb Foundry is Permaweb’s talent scouter, an essential part of Arweave’s ecosystem that represents a beacon of light for every early-stage Web3 project. Opposite to almost all the similar initiatives in the crypto space, OWF is not aiming to create flashy hackathons with tons of submissions, cramped in a couple of weeks which makes you wonder if you attended a technical event or a marketing stunt.

They represent a continuous hackathon, divided into successive editions; when one is complete, another starts. They help everyone from refining the initial idea to product development, intermediate feedback, and the actual go-to-market. Each edition of 100.000$ is waiting to be divided among the finalists.

The sixth edition of OWF just concluded, culminating with Demo Day, an event that showcased each finalist of the current OWF.

We usually tend to present only the finalists of each edition, but we asked ourselves: what would happen if we started to introduce all the participants? Not all of them managed to reach the final stage of the current incubator, but they all deserve our compliments for entering this program. 

Maybe some ideas are not mature enough yet, or on the contrary, the infrastructure isn’t yet capable of sustaining an initiative that has a too ambitious scope. Maybe some teams still lack some core members, or they just have to work a little more to improve. Nevertheless, they are all at the entrance gate of Arweave’s great community.

I believe that if we introduce them earlier to Arweave’s community, we can change the entire trajectory of a project, which otherwise maybe would have been doomed to fail. A piece of advice on a specific aspect, a connection made with a veteran Arweaver, or any kind of interaction could be helpful in these early stages. We tried to provide at least one contact point for each participant so that you could connect with them.

On the entire duration of OWF #6, over 20 projects covering a wide range of use-cases for Arweave were presented.

We tried to take statements (for those we couldn’t reach, if you are reading this, give us a sign and we’ll include your opinion) from as many of them as possible to better understand how newcomers perceive their first steps into the Permaweb. Some of them were laudative, others were critical. We kept them both! One of the hardest things to do is receive criticism and assume it constructively—food for thought for the incoming OWF editions.

Without further ado, we present to you:

The finalists

Astronation/ArtStation

This initiative is an indie take on building a VR native metaverse. The enterprise stretches years into the past and only recently crystalised in a pre-alfa stage. Imagine a Sci-Fi space-themed world rich in content, in which each planet, space station, or space ship represents a crypto project.

The Arweave connection is made through ArtStation, the VR counterpart of a decentralized NFT marketplace. NFT billboards in Times Square are such last season when one can have their NFT displayed on an orbital station!

1st community-built star station focused on exhibition and monetization of art in the virtual world of Astronation. They were featuring 100m vast billboards to showcase NFTs. Trade stations facilitating sales. Arweave for permanent storage of assets. PSC for governance and profit share.

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find about Open Web Foundry?
A: I learned about Arweave from the community converstations, in particular the OWF hackathon was recommended to me by one of its previous participants and others who were just observing.
Last year, one of my clients asked me for integration of their NFT marketplace with a decentralized storage solution. This made me take more time to learn about the Arweave ecosystem and review the maturity of its tech stack. Since I was just supporting that team, I’ve built the requested PoC, connected some people, and moved on. But… this built my perspective on the opportunities and the utility Arweave is providing to the developer community.

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with Arweave ecosystem?
A: Fruitful I think is the best word that comes to my mind I’ve been enjoying the Deep Dives, Community Spotlight presentations, and the additional materials provided by email and on discord.
I’m also grateful for being able to present Astronation during the Community Spotlight. It happened just when I released the first alpha version of the VR world, so the timing for my project was perfect. That’s pretty much the first time I was showing ArtStation on the moon’s orbit
I think the presentation was well received as it resulted in one new investor voicing interest and hopefully more learning about the project.
Interacting with the Arweave ecosystem is fun and quite straightforward. I also really appreciate how approachable the Arweave team is. The ecosystem seems to have evolved a lot and fast, so coming to it “online search first” is a bit confusing at a first glance. I imagine it might be also a challenge to identify the current / preferred dev-toolset with all of available libraries, frameworks and approaches.

Q: Why do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?
A: Arweave provides a useful framework allowing me to use decentralized storage for user-generated content that builds up the virtual world.
With Arweave technology I can make this content stay user owned, permanent, and enabled for open collaboration.
Furthermore, Profit Sharing Tokens provide a useful utility for automation of community activities. For example, users of the virtual star station can vote on the NFTs that will be displayed on station’s billboards and traded in its storefronts.

Rare Candy 3D

Rare Candy 3D is an NFT platform that wants to become the gateway into NFTs for artists that are working both in digital and physical realms but don’t possess any knowledge whatsoever about web3 technologies. They are preparing the launch of a new iteration of their dApp with a set of distinct features for both the artists:

and the regular users:

Also, they aim to create a new layer of data besides the traditional NFT metadata. This data layer will give a secondary market seller the power to develop customizable descriptions on particular NFTs to add further context on what those NFTs represent and why they are selling them. This way, sellers could personalize a listing for specific audiences.

On top of all those components, they add a customizable NFT media player into the mix.
Listen to your favorite music NFTs. Various NFT skins for your media player shall unlock many unique utilities and features, such as DJ tools, repeat, shuffle functions, and playlists.

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find about Open Web Foundry?
A: We found Arweave as we were looking for funding and feedback on our project and Arweave team (if not wrong) informed us that they were not actively investing but via their OWF were helping projects show their activities and maybe get external funding

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with Arweave ecosystem?

A: As for the experience, I loved being part of the OWF meeting on gather.town and was very curious to listen to other projects. some of which had insanely interesting concepts. the connections that can be made in these meetups are very interesting.

Q: Why do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?

A: With regards to Arweave use cases for Rarecandy3D, we are looking for different storage solutions for our assets. We could use arweave infrastructure as an IPFS provider, to store standalone pages pegged to SiLo/HaLo chips and we could use Arweave to host our DApps/websites

A-Symmetry/DLT EO

A-Simmetry represents a broader protocol than the scope of the initially presented dApp – DLT EO. They define themselves as “a protocol for processing and trading sensitive data“.

DLT EO is an AI-run, community-driven dApp for Earth Observation-related data that brings satellite data to Web3.

They started the work back in 2018 after realizing that the existing model for getting information from raw, unprocessed satellite data was cumbersome, costly, and lengthy. 

DLT EO proposes a novel approach by splitting the process into four distinct areas: data provider, developer community, computation provider, and end-user. Their workflow is described in the below image.

Project’s voice

Q: So, first of all, how did you find out about OWF?
A: Oh, we heard it from Redstone. They were very nice to let us know there’s a program for startups like us.

Q: How was your experience during this OWF edition?
A: It was fantastic! Jesse and Sebastian and Lucas have been with us until the last minute of rehearsal. Also they took a lot of time to understand and redesign our storyline. The new way of explaining, and understanding our technology just blew my mind.

Q: Why Arweave? What are the traits that make Arweave more appealing for your project than other protocols?
A: Arweave is definitely at an early stage compared with other public chains but the smart weave just opened a lot of possibilities for running any algorithms in a smart contract. It separated computation and storage, making it one of the most promising technology infrastructures in the current market.

Q: I saw that you broadened the scope of your project by introducing “A-symmetry”. What are the future plans for this broader umbrella?
A: We are working on a layer2 solution on Smart weave so our protocol could make this new data-computation paradigm possible. For the moment it’s still quite hard to fully utilize smart weave on everything. It will take a lot of time and people’s efforts to make it to that stage.

Q: You are one of the few projects that were incubated in a more conservative space – the European Space Agency. How are academia and other more traditional research centers perceive crypto? (Especially throughout Europe, given their proposed regulation package)
A: We are pretty much the first pure Blockchain or crypto native company incubated in ESA BIC. To be honest, they don’t hate crypto but they just hope we could use Blockchain on something that could really bring value to society or human civilization, rather than just building bubbles or Ponzi schemes on top of bubbles. If there’s a project using Blockchain in a reasonable way and also could really disrupt web2, they’re happy to see it coming.

Contributor Town

Web3 made it crystal clear: the success of an initiative is in direct proportionality to the quality of the team behind it. Obtaining funding has become a simple matter. The challenge is to use those funds in the most efficient way possible.

Contributor Town delivers precisely this: a solution that wants to fill the gap between High-quality contributors and DAOs through data science.

The founder behind this project, JB Rubinovitz, is by every standard a veteran, being in crypto since 2016. Her strong background as an AI researcher offers further assurances for Contributor Town’s potential and delivers shivers to all the lazy DAO members, including myself.

Below you’ll find a glance at their proposed road map for this year:

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find out about OWF, what was your experience until now?
A: I’d been excited about Arweave since USV invested, but hasn’t really kept up with the ecosystem. Then @cryptowanderer gave a kernel fellowship class called NFTEasy that used Arweave and I reached out regarding grants and Jesse at Arweave suggested OWF. I like that OWF is distributed and allows you to use the resources that fit your stage and project.

Q: What about Arweave? How does it fit your project?
A: I am really excited about Arweave because its PSCs can allow for really great incentives for our community to contribute to our platform, and I love how Smartweave enables GPU usage and therefore AI in a smart contract language.

Kip Engine

They are working on a blockchain native game engine built to power a decentralized, interoperable metaverse. And yeah, we don’t know how to stress it enough, but their game engine is made from scratch, with its sole purpose in mind. It is entirely independent, not linked with Unreal Engine or Unity.

Kip Engine promises a smooth experience for developers and non-developers alike, with a sandbox-type approach that can introduce and automate 3d objects and a complete SDK, operable in Java Script for those obsessed with optimizing the performance of their games.

TalentDAO

They are a niche venture, looking into disrupting the entrenched ways academia is publishing their articles. There is a closed system nowadays; several gatekeepers control the scientific journals and devise the rules that scholars should obey. You can not evolve as a scholar if you don’t publish your articles in journals ranked higher according to different ranking systems usually made by the same entities controlling the journals. Even supposedly fair, citation-based metrics could be used to favor certain practices.

What is the outcome of such a system? Scholars are constrained to pay the journals to keep their work open source. Even worse, sometimes researchers have to change their scope of research to fit an editorial “recipe” used by a publication or another.

TalentDAO aims to deliver the academic journal of Web3, one that should address the shortcomings of the current publishing system.

FORA

This project tackles the problem behind Web3 social platforms. They believe that the stack offered by Solana+Arweave, combined with their take on a social platform model, will represent the first winning combination of blockchain and social apps.

FORA bets on clever tokenomics and a relatable user experience for Web2 users to bring together the best of the two worlds.

All the participants

Rawrshak

This team is building an NFT platform focused on gaming assets. Their vision leverages the permanence of Arweave storage to create a truly interoperable metaverse where in-game NFTs could wander freely through a myriad of different games.

The founder, Christian Sumido,  has worked for companies like Microsoft and Electronic Arts before starting this current venture, so it is safe to assume that Rawrshak has quite some clout in its quest to become one of the pillars of the future Web3 gaming industry. We covered Rawrshak extensively in a dedicated article, which we encourage you to check.

HS.Credit

Nadav Zaimar, the founder of HighSchool.Credit proposes a bold project, one that seeks to change the way in which education is carried out nowadays. He identified an overload of biases in the current system from the path credits are issued, to the standardized thinking that is killing the creativity and problem-solving capacity in our youngsters.

The suggested solution is rather complex because guess what, complex problems need complex solutions, but at the core, it consists of an immutable ledger of transcripts, with the work that led to the gain of a certain credit being a permanent NFT to be available for review by any interested party.

Joint Investment DAO

This project is aiming to use the power of profit-sharing communities in order to link physical business with DeFi. Their purpose is to build a DAO that will invest in an incipient, but already booming industry: legal cannabis; the whole enterprise will have a social twist:

The community will strive to identify potential entrepreneurs (who have been formerly incarcerated for nonviolent cannabis-related charges and/or whose lives have been unfairly impacted by cannabis-related laws, and otherwise may lack the start-up capital to achieve their visions) with profitable business plans, uplift these entrepreneurs, and mutually benefit from a symbiotic relationship with each one.

For an overview of the entire project we recommend that you study their detailed presentation; their social proposition is quite compelling. 

By the way, they are in need of a developer, so, if you have the skills and you like their idea maybe you should try to contact them. Their email is jointinvestmentdao@gmail.com

4EVERLAND

Aims to become the backbone of the transition from web2 to web3. They offer a platform that encompasses storage, computing power, and network core capabilities for developers.

Right now their product, which has no KYC requirements,  already supplies hosting services based on IPFS and a migration environment for data stored on Amazon S3 to IPFS.

4EVERLAND is based on 3 key components:

• IBC – chain state synchronization and multichain deployment services.
• Storage Layer – currently they are integrated with IPFS but they are in the works to diversify the decentralized storage by integrating with Arweave too. Guess what, meanwhile, they finished the integration with Arweave, which they announced through an Arweave News article. Please check it here.
• Global Gateway – they are offering a diversity of cloud computing services based on DDNS, Data I\O, and Cert Manager integrations.

They are perfectly aware of the fact that bringing together IPFS and Arweave will put them in the position of building the bridge that will synchronize the two storage solutions, bringing to IPFS stored assets the resilience of Arweave.

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find out about Open Web Foundry?

A:Arweave is really an excellent and promising network, OWF is well known as a portal into Arweave’s ecological, 4EVERLAND have been paying attention to that.

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with Arweave ecosystem?

A: Since we signed up, we have received a very detailed guide for the event. At the same time, we have witnessed the strong influence and scalability of Arweave through the projects of multiple participants. We are excited to introduce ourselves through OWF and look forward to 4EVERLAND serving more developers in the Arweave ecosystem, as well as enabling more developers to develop their own projects on the Arweave network.We are making good progress, Arweave has provided a lot of technical documentation for us to better integrate, we quickly achieved our OWF integration goals and established a bridge between Arweave and AWS-S3 and IPFS.

Q: Why do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?

A: 4EVERLAND is a cloud computing platform of Web3, We have been constantly developing ourselves, for devs and users to provide diversified Web3 services; As one of the most well-known storage networks in the industry, Arweave is trusted by a large number of developers and users. 4EVERLAND’s integration with Arweave will bring a new usage scenario for our service – the permaweb.

VINCIIS

VINCIIS is building the decentralized ad ecosystem of tomorrow, one that is trying to detach itself from the malicious practices of web2 advertising. With the help of their envisioned product “clickbait” or “data surveillance” will be extinct terms, found only by passionate linguists while rummaging through ancient texts stored in Arweave’s archives.

They are managing to fulfill this proposition by using the power of Koi Network’s atomic NFTs; each ad managed by their platform will represent an atomic NFT that will counter the true reach of particular ads through Koi Network’s attention filter. To further enhance the popularity of their solution they are wrapping the whole experience through a gamification process. 

Uniiku

Represents a startup that wants to link the physical world with the blockchain. They are already offering a functional way of tagging physical objects by pairing a QR code (that caries the description of the object, or as the Uniiku team likes to put it: “the story” ) with some glitter patterns (that grants the authenticity of the tag), an original technique devised by them.

Now they are preparing for the next step: the tokenization into the permanence of the digital counterparts of those tags on Arweave.

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find out about Open Web Foundry?

A: I am working on a project that requires storing data forever. When we were starting, about 3 years ago I looked at IPFS but it didn’t fit my needs. At that time we opted to store the assets in a database and timestamping them with opentimestamps (great project). Some months ago I discovered arweave and of course it clicked. I followed the project, bundlr was a point of infection in my trust for the project. We entered OWF aiming to do a deep dive and assesing the cost of migrating part of our system to arweave. It’s been a success and we are quite sure that we are going to do it sooner than later.

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with Arweave ecosystem?

A; My experience with OWF has been mostly positive. The thing I value the most is the optimism and momentum in the community.

Q: Why do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?
A: Uniiku is a tag that protects and increases the value in physical things. It’s a tricky product to explain because it’s different to any competitor. It’s unusual in crypto in that it has a physical part and it targets mainstream customers (not just crypto) Using Arweave allows us to solve several ux problems at the same time and makes the product easier to understand and use. We hope to conect with some like minded people in the ecosystem, because we share some way to think about what values matter. I hope to find a place in here for the long term.

Shareweave

The founder of this initiative, Ian, is still a teenager, probably one of the youngest participants in OWF.

His project is centered around a simple, yet powerful idea: the internet is all about sharing and Shareweave is the open-source SDK that will let its users share everything with everyone. 

Its main focus is to facilitate the easy design of social dApps, being essentially a gateway layer for managing the creation and retrieval of content.

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find out about Open Web Foundry?
A: Hey, I started Shareweave after I realized how hard it would be to simply make a site where people could share their shops that accept certain crypto. And the sharing problem is something that happens across other sites, too. I like decentralization, so I wanted to make it decentralized too – cause why not? Note: decentralized is different from popular web3. I eventually found Mirror, which allowed people to share blog posts on web3. I did some research, figured out that it was built on Arweave, and dove into Arweave from there. The world of startups was completely new to me so I was very happy to get the chance to pitch to Jesse. He recommended the OWF so I signed up for that and went from there.

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with the Arweave ecosystem?
A: It was good, kind of. The curriculum was okay, it felt more like tutorials for building apps on Arweave or even ads for Arweave instead of a help in making a company. The development help was minimal. Jesse put me in a group with Arweave devrel people, but frankly, they weren’t *that* helpful. One of the things emphasized was that the Arweave community helps OWF projects, but only @onlyarweave helped at all, I got a lot more help from a teen dev community I’m a part of.

Q: Do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?
A: Arweave had a lot of problems, especially with the gateway. I had three options: make the app much more centralized, make it slow and hard to build, or leave Arweave. I chose the latter. From there I moved to GunDB, but with user research, I’m starting to realize that storage isn’t the problem here, and there’s no reason to be on web3. Moderation is a much bigger problem to solve than the backend.

Q: Can you elaborate on the moderation issue you found? I mean, What’s your vision? (For me it seems like a very intricate topic: how to reconcile the need for moderation with the idea of free speech)
A: Ah, moderation is hard. The idea was to save everything on-chain, and in the default interface, only approved posts are shown. This is a fairly simple way to do decentralized moderation, there are other methods that are more decentralized. But Arweave makes it hard to do this. Think of something even simpler, just deleting posts. We can’t truly do it on Arweave. Instead, we need to fetch a list of posts, a list of deletions, a list of undeletions, then merge a large list client-side and fetch each post with an individual HTTP request. The gateway has indexing, but it needs a way to make custom indexes. Think about likes for example. Could we write a smart contract to index the likes, instead of fetching every like and counting and verifying it client-side? […] One problem with permanent storage for social: it challenges the ingrained social model where we post what we want, delete it later and if something bad gets out we are shamed and lose opportunities. I’m not saying this shouldn’t be changed, but that it is hard to change.

Ubikom

They advertise themself like a decentralized infrastructure of digital avatars, cryptographic IDs owned and managed by users. They envision at least three use cases: a decentralized email protocol, a secure foundational utility for IoT, and a universal wallet.

For OWF submission, Ubikom highlighted the integration of Arweave storage inside their email protocol. A casual folder named Forever will let even the least tech-savvy user store any data they envision worthy of forever remembrance on Arweave.

CrypNote

They are a decentralized solution for taking notes, both personally or in a collaborative environment, proposing a Write to Earn model. Az, our colleague, covered extensively CrypNote in a dedicated article. Feel free to check it.

Project’s voice (delivered with the help of Az)

Q: How did you find out about Open Web Foundry?
A: I learned about OWF from AR Twitter.

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with the Arweave ecosystem?
A: Everything is going well so far. OWF has played an incubating role in the AR ecosystem, making more good projects stand out.

Q: Why do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?
A: CrypNote takes content as its core, and AR permanent storage network is undoubtedly the best choice. To achieve true decentralization, web3 is inseparable from the features of AR. At the same time, I am also optimistic about the long-term development of AR in the future, and I expect that AR will have more underlying products to support CrypNote to better build web3 content ecology. For example, retrieval protocol and so on.

EnRex

Their motto, “Make crypto green again,” encompasses the primary goal of their project: a crypto gateway to carbon allowances and renewable energy certificates markets that allows not only the trading of those kinds of products but offsets the burden of non-green power consumption from a wide range of chains.
Individuals and Crypto projects could calculate through EnRex dApp the electricity used by the activity of specific wallets or intelligent contracts and easily buy the necessary amount of green certificates to offset their on-chain activity.

Enrex decentralized application (dapp) will let you offset your certificates by entering comments to provide the cancellation amount and the cancellation object. The dapp will perform the automation of certificate canceling in the real world registries and issuing an NFT as proof of cancellation. All cancellations will be tracked on blockchain and reality registries with proof traceability. Again, dapp is the further step in a proof-of-history architectural style of Enrex’s ecosystem.

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find Open Web Foundry?
A: We found Arweave when looking for the answers to how to calculate the carbon footprint of the NFT minting process. Knowing that Arweave stores the biggest part of NFTs in all of the blockchain, it was obvious for us to look deeper into both Arweave and the Open web foundry behind them.

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with the Arweave ecosystem?
A: We really like the idea and the organization behind the OWF Incubator and the whole Arweave ecosystem. We experienced some next-level virtual meetings and made several presentations regarding the possible implementation of Arweave in the Enrex ecosystem.

Q: Why do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?
A: So at first, every project on the blockchain has to store data somewhere, as we see Arweave leading the process of decentralized data storage on Solana. We will use arweave for storing certificates and other information. Arewave also has huge potential to be the trailblazers in NFT carbon offsetting and we have great plans for what our collaboration can bring in the future. There are a lot of angles that we see, through which our cooperation can bring a new era into Crypto – a green crypto future.

R-Archive

R-Archive is the project behind the Rohingya Archive, an initiative that we covered in a dedicated article some time ago.

They aim to become an Archival humanitarian infrastructure that will guard the right to be remembered by the oppressed. Refugee camps are not simple masses of persons without history or country. They are brutal but transitive realities for humans with a heritage, a past that defines their culture and future.

R-Archive is the gateway to permanent safeguarding through blockweave, identity documents, land deeds, and any other files that could prove the personal history of an individual that was forcibly removed from his land.
Their future goals, tech-wise, are to further refine the product through integrating Bundlr Network, adding search filters, and refining their metadata fields.

Bridge Market

They presented a new way of conducting cross-chain transactions when trading NFTs. Instead of creating bridged tokens, their platform acts like an oracle separating the chain where the NFT lives from the transaction’s chain.

From what we understood, users would register multiple wallet addresses for different chains they own, creating a cross-chain ID system. When one user is listing an NFT minted on ETH, for example, he could receive payment in BTC, and the platform will send the NFT to the ETH address of the buyer, even if he made the payment from a BTC address.

Given that multi-chain wallets are a common thing to see in the crypto space nowadays, this could represent an interesting take in dealing with the increased silo approach that cripples the entire blockchain industry.

DojoPop

Proof of practice. A digital dojo passport for martial arts communities. It brings in Web3, the 100-year-old ranking system of the martial arts. The dApp intends to augment the everyday practice in this field by letting its users check-in with the DojoPop wallet and record every training session they attended. For each challenge one had passed on his way to the proverbial back belt, the practitioner will receive a “challenge coin NFT” that will certify his/hers tier.

In this niched world of martial arts, where authentic lineage is of crucial importance, the provenance trait of the blockchain could have an essential role in proving that a person obtained his belts in a reputable dojo.
Arweave comes in place by securing the existence of those digital lineages for hundreds of years.

Project’s voice

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator
A: I think it’s great, I think it’s very valuable having access to some of the OG arweave builders [and] Jesse is awesome, but presenting a project on gathertown sucks.  I don’t mind other people presenting on gathertown, but I felt it really hard to connect to the crowd personally over that app. Maybe I just need more practice presenting on it. That’s really my biggest complaint and it’s obviously likely personal.

Q: Why Arweave? What traits make Arweave a better fit for your project than other protocols?

A: I come from a film background and I was initially looking at ways to store feature films decentralized and so was kicking around between Filecoin and Arweave and I heard Sam talk during on Kernel block three presentation and I was really impressed by his vision. Also as I’m a newbie coder, I’m much more interested in learning how to work more with Javascript than kicking around with Solidity.

Q: So, it seems that this current participation is only the beginning. What are your plans for the future?
A: I’m gonna keep working on DojoPop, [and] I’ve started working on a matrix-synapse arweave backend that I’m calling Skorpio.

Drop Magnet

This initiative could be described as the NFT social profile creator. They are trying to offer a whole NFT experience, from the moment of searching the market for potential buys to showcasing your purchased NFTs.

For the initial curation and NFT discovery, Drop Magnet offers a neat interface with a swipe right or left feature, which helps the users cut through the noise and narrow their search down to a handful of NFTs that present interest. They have plans to further refine this process, adding a buying functionality that can be performed through that swipe feature, offering a truly unified experience.

When it comes to the NFT social profile, Drop Magnet envisioned it as a feature that at the same time identifies a user from the crowd and connects them with a broader community of like-minded individuals.

They manage to do that by displaying the name of the user and his type (they call them “tribes,” an identifier that could be chosen by the user so that I could be “Pierre the writer” or “Pierre the creator”; in this way, I will remain Pierre, but I’ll manage to identify myself with a tribe and to spot each other easily).

Project’s voice

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with the Arweave ecosystem?
A: Hey! I think it’s fun to present. We’re only using storage at this point so we weren’t invited to pitch on pitch day. Would have been good to know that first. Arweave seems to be aligned with our values for preserving data and storing data in a decentralized manner. Would be interested in providing storage for the network at a later date.

ArGalaxy

NFT migration services to Arweave.

ArGaArGalaxy is the project of OurGalaxyDAO. They identified one of the core problems of NFTs nowadays, a problem we addressed in our articles more than once: the fragility of the files and metadata stored on non-permanent mediums. ArGalaxy aims to deliver a way to migrate the NFT data to Arweave storage, offering a license that certifies the storage on Arweave and file comparison services to grant the fidelity of the transition. They are an initiative whose evolution is worth keeping an eye on.

Project’s voice

Q: How did you find out about Open Web Foundry?
A: I found it because I used Arweave to store our NFTs, and think of a brilliant concept to migrate existing solutions from IPFS to Arweave to protect the expensive NFTs. So why not participate in the Foundry for a chance to promote OurGalaxyDAO??

Q: How was so far your experience with the OWF incubator and with the Arweave ecosystem?
A: Not much to comment. we are quite disappointed about postponing our presentation since we had been working hard for weeks.

Q: Why do you think Arweave is suitable for your project?
A: Permanent storage, low cost.

Wrapping out OWF #6

I certainly don’t want to be in the place of the guys from OWF board. Having such a lineup of projects and being forced to choose only some sounds like a  stressful job. Nevertheless, they manage to deal with all the pressure and deliver quality coaching for almost everyone. The proof lies in the positive feedback we got from the participants in most of the cases and in the alumni they have.

The Community Spotlight #1 was a round-up of those alumni. These projects now lead the innovation inside the Arweave ecosystem, like RedStone Finance, Verto Exchange, Spheron Network, Kyve Network, and Koii Network.

The next Community Spotlights: #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6 were mainly dedicated to the new projects presented above. We strongly encourage you to view all of them (the links are provided on the numbers) to understand better what they consist of.

A worthy of mentioning Community Spotlight is #4. This one was a special edition featuring, in the beginning, Arweave’s founder, Sam Williams, and Bundlr team (Bundlr Network is responsible for almost 70% of the uploads on Arweave, facilitating the pay for data storage in multiple cryptocurrencies).

Funding, as we know, is critical for the success of any project, and OWF delivers that at the early stages. We have a simple message for those who didn’t make the cut: persevere. The next edition of OWF is beginning in no time; moreover, there are other synergic funding possibilities. Remember that Arweave.build is already out there in the open for everyone who’s cunning enough.

I want to believe that this edition of the Open Web Foundry, highlighted eight projects indeed but brought inside the Arweave community over 20!

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