Filecoin Foundation and the GSR Foundation are backing five projects that use decentralized storage for things most crypto funding rounds don’t go near. War crime evidence. Refugee oral histories. Experimental art is at risk of disappearing. Geospatial data that researchers can’t reliably access. Ocean ecosystem records turned into sensory experiences. All five are already active within the Filecoin ecosystem.
The GSR Foundation is the philanthropic arm of global cryptocurrency firm GSR, focused on social good through responsible blockchain application. Together, the two organizations are backing a cohort of projects that use decentralized storage for things most crypto funding rounds don’t touch: preserving war crime evidence, archiving refugee stories, protecting experimental art from obsolescence, making geospatial data accessible, and connecting people emotionally to endangered ocean ecosystems.
Why These Two Organizations Are Working Together
Filecoin Foundation’s mission is to preserve humanity’s most important information. The GSR Foundation’s mandate is social impact through blockchain and crypto. The overlap between those two goals is where this cohort sits.
The five selected projects were originally supported by Filecoin Foundation and its sister organization, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. GSR Foundation comes in as a co-founder with deep experience in crypto-native impact work. The collaboration is designed as a model, not just a funding round. Both organizations want to show philanthropy, crypto, and impact investing what mission-driven funding combined with technical infrastructure can actually produce.
The Five Projects and What They Do
The Starling Lab, co-founded by Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering and USC Shoah Foundation, builds technology for establishing the authenticity and provenance of digital records. Its Capture, Store, Verify framework uses Filecoin’s verifiable storage to protect photographs, audio, video, and web content from manipulation.
In an environment where deepfakes and disinformation are routine, the ability to prove that a piece of evidence is unaltered matters enormously, especially for war crimes documentation and journalistic records.
The EASIER Data Initiative, based at the University of Maryland, builds decentralized infrastructure for geospatial and location-based data. Satellite imagery, urban planning datasets, environmental records. The kind of data that researchers, public institutions, and NGOs need but often can’t access reliably because it sits on centralized cloud services that can be taken down, restricted, or made unaffordable. EASIER uses Filecoin to keep that data openly accessible, particularly in regions where infrastructure or access is limited.
TRANSFER Data Trust is an artist-owned cooperative for archiving and maintaining experimental media artworks. Many of these works risk disappearing due to technological obsolescence or simple neglect. Built on Filecoin Virtual Machine smart contracts and decentralized storage, the Data Trust lets artists store their work, govern how it’s used, and build equity over time. It’s a cultural preservation ecosystem that gives control to creators rather than institutions.
Akashic is a decentralized memory archive for refugees and displaced communities. Akashic, developed with Funding the Commons, stores these stories on Filecoin so they stay accessible and can’t be quietly erased. The communities whose stories these are keep control of them, rather than handing that control to institutions with other priorities.
Oceanic Whispers, made by CROSSLUCID with RadicalxChange and Serpentine, takes raw data from Marine Protected Areas, stores it on Filecoin, and turns it into something you can actually experience. AI narration, haptic interfaces, sensory installations. Ecological data that would otherwise sit in a spreadsheet becomes something people feel. A partial common ownership model makes sure the value that data generates flows back to the scientists, communities, and marine environments that produced it in the first place.
What Decentralized Storage Makes Possible Here
The common thread across all five projects is that centralized infrastructure would not support what they are trying to do. A centralized server can be shut down, censored, made inaccessible, or simply allowed to decay. Evidence of war crimes stored on a private server is only as permanent as the organization maintaining it. Refugee oral histories on a cloud platform are subject to that platform’s business decisions.
Filecoin’s decentralized storage removes those single points of failure. Data stored and verified on Filecoin doesn’t rely on any one organization keeping the lights on. That property is what makes it suitable for records that need to outlast the institutions that created them.
Final Words
Both foundations are explicit that this collaboration is meant to be a template. The goal is to show that mission-driven funding and technical infrastructure can work together to produce social impact that neither could generate alone.
Five projects. Five different problems. One shared infrastructure layer. Filecoin Foundation and GSR Foundation are funding real use cases that demonstrate what decentralized storage can do beyond finance and speculation. War crime evidence, refugee memory, endangered art, geospatial science, and ocean ecology all benefit from infrastructure that can’t be switched off. That’s the point the two foundations are trying to make, and these projects make it credibly.
