Filecoin Foundation and GSR Foundation are backing five projects that use decentralized storage for something that most crypto funding rounds don’t come close to. Evidence of war crimes. Oral history of refugees. Experimental art is on the verge of extinction. Geospatial data that researchers cannot reliably access. Recording the marine ecosystem has been transformed into a sensory experience. All five are already active within the Filecoin ecosystem.
.@FilFoundation and @GSR_io Foundation support projects that store satellite data, historical records, digital media, and more on Filecoin.
These systems do not rely on trust in one provider. You can prove that the data still exists and has not changed. pic.twitter.com/11T1REH9Ql
— Filecoin (@Filecoin) March 23, 2026
GSR Foundation is the philanthropic arm of global cryptocurrency company GSR, focused on social good through responsible blockchain applications. Together, the organizations are supporting a series of projects that use distributed storage to do things that most crypto funding rounds don’t touch on: preserving evidence of war crimes, archiving refugee stories, protecting experimental art from obsolescence, enabling access to geospatial data, and emotionally connecting people to endangered marine ecosystems.
Why these two organizations work together
Filecoin Foundation’s mission is to preserve humanity’s most important information. GSR Foundation’s mission is social impact through blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The intersection of these two goals is the location of this cohort.
The five selected projects were originally supported by the Filecoin Foundation and its sister organization, the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. GSR Foundation joins as a co-founder with deep experience in crypto-native impact work. This collaboration is designed as a model, not just a funding round. Both organizations hope to demonstrate impact investing that shows what mission-driven funding combined with philanthropy, cryptocurrencies, and technology infrastructure can actually produce.
5 projects and their contents
Starling Lab, co-founded by Stanford University’s School of Electrical Engineering and the USC Shoah Foundation, is building technology to establish the authenticity and provenance of digital records. Its Capture, Store, and Verify framework uses Filecoin’s verifiable storage to protect photos, audio, video, and web content from manipulation.
In an environment where deepfakes and disinformation are commonplace, the ability to prove that evidence has not been altered is critical, especially in war crimes documents and journalistic records.
The EASIER Data Initiative, based at the University of Maryland, is building a distributed infrastructure for geospatial and location-based data. Satellite images, urban planning datasets, and environmental records. This is the kind of data that researchers, public authorities, and NGOs need, but often cannot reliably access because it resides on centralized cloud services and can be deleted, restricted, or no longer affordable. EASIER uses Filecoin to keep its data openly accessible, especially in regions with limited infrastructure or access.
TRANSFER Data Trust is an artist-owned cooperative dedicated to archiving and maintaining experimental media works. Many of these works are in danger of disappearing through technological obsolescence or simple neglect. The Filecoin virtual machine’s smart contracts and data trust built on decentralized storage allow artists to store their work, control how it’s used, and build equity over time. This is a cultural preservation ecosystem that gives control to creators rather than institutions.
Akashic is a decentralized memory archive for refugee and displaced communities. Developed in partnership with Funding the Commons, Akashic stores these stories in Filecoin, so they remain accessible and cannot be quietly erased. Communities working on these stories maintain control of them, rather than handing it over to organizations with other priorities.
Created by CROSSLUCID in collaboration with RadicalxChange and Serpentine, Oceanic Whispers takes raw data from marine reserves, stores it in Filecoin, and turns it into something you can experience. AI narration, tactile interfaces, and sensory installations. Ecological data stored in spreadsheets becomes what people feel. A fractional shared ownership model ensures that the value generated by data is returned to the scientists who originally generated it, the community, and the marine environment.
What distributed storage enables
What all five projects have in common is that a centralized infrastructure cannot support what they are trying to do. Centralized servers can be shut down, censored, become inaccessible, or simply rot away. Evidence of war crimes stored on private servers is only as durable as the organization maintaining it. Refugee oral histories on a cloud platform are subject to that platform’s business decisions.
Filecoin’s decentralized storage eliminates these single points of failure. The data stored and verified on Filecoin is not dependent on any particular organization keeping the lights on. This characteristic makes it suitable for records that need to outlast the institution that created them.
last word
Both foundations have made it clear that this collaboration is a template. The goal is to show that mission-driven funding and technology infrastructure can work together to create social impact that neither one alone can create.
5 projects. 5 different problems. One shared infrastructure layer. Filecoin Foundation and GSR Foundation are funding real-world use cases that demonstrate what decentralized storage can do beyond finance and speculation. War crimes evidence, refugee memory, endangered art, geospatial science, and marine ecology all benefit from infrastructure that cannot be turned off. That’s the point the two foundations are trying to make, and these projects certainly make it happen.
