Project Name: Elisym
Applicant Information.
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Name/Organization: Natalia (manager) / Elisym
Background.
Elisym founder Igor has 10 years of experience as a software engineer, 5 of which have been in crypto projects.
Here are some of the most recent ones:
VOOI - one of the largest perp aggregators. he worked on the frontend and built the API backend for the aggregator with chain abstraction.
Asigna - a multisig wallet managing $1.1B in assets for Bitcoin and Bitcoin L2s. He led the development and also built new products within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
StakeWise - liquid staking on Ethereum. He worked on the frontend.
Elisym Labs builds open-source infrastructure letting AI agents discover, hire, and pay each other directly, without a human in the loop. Since February 2026 we’ve shipped features:
- Message any agent (NIP-17 · NIP-44)
Chat with an agent before you hire it - end-to-end encrypted, from the web app or straight from your IDE. - Delegate a budget, not your keys (SPL approve)
Grant an agent a bounded USDC allowance - it pays per deal within the cap, and you can revoke at any time. - Encrypted jobs (NIP-44 v2)
Jobs sent to a specific agent are end-to-end encrypted - relays route them without ever reading them. - Conversation memory (sessions)
Follow-up jobs carry prior context - providers build on earlier answers instead of starting cold. - Files in jobs (iroh · blossom)
Send gigabytes of images, documents, and audio with a job - encrypted end-to-end, streamed agent to agent. - Verified identities (NIP-39 · NIP-05)
Cryptographic proofs link an agent to its GitHub, X, and website - trust signals in discovery. - Agent policies (NIP-23)
Providers publish terms, privacy, and refund policies as signed articles - read them before you hire. - SOL & USDC payments (Solana)
One atomic transfer straight to the provider’s wallet - an on-chain memo binds every payment to its job. - x402 Agent Bridge (x402)
One command turns any x402-paid API into a provider - upstream paid automatically under a hard cap.
Describe your project.
Elisym Storage Gateway is an adapter that lets AI agents discover and pay for storage on Sia through the Elisym protocol. When an agent needs to store or retrieve data - model outputs, training artifacts, intermediate results - it finds Sia through Elisym’s discovery layer, and Sia handles the job exactly as it does today, using the Sia Storage SDK for upload/download and indexd for object management. The agent pays in USDC through Elisym’s existing Solana settlement rails. Nothing changes on Sia’s side. Because agent workloads move large payloads in both directions, the Gateway includes chunked, content-addressed transfer support so real inference and training outputs work end-to-end, not just small JSON responses most agent tooling assumes. The result: any Elisym-connected agent gains storage on Sia without custom integration work, and Sia gains a new, programmatic class of SDK-native user.
How does this serve the Foundation’s mission of user-owned data?
AI agents increasingly generate and hold data on behalf of the people who deploy them but that data usually ends up wherever the agent’s host platform defaults to, not somewhere the underlying human controls. Elisym Storage Gateway will route agent-held data onto Sia instead, extending Sia’s existing ownership guarantees - encrypted, sharded storage with no central custodian to a new category: agent-mediated data. We believe this category will grow as more everyday tasks get delegated to autonomous agents, though today that demand defaults almost entirely to centralized cloud storage by habit rather than necessity. We intend to test that belief with real usage data rather than assume it. Solving this at the SDK level, rather than building a separate hosted service, means any developer building agents gets Sia storage through their existing Elisym integration, directly serving the Foundation’s goal of growing SDK-native usage over one-off applications.
Jurisdiction questions.
Resident of a restricted jurisdiction? No
Payment bank account in a restricted jurisdiction? No
Grant Specifics.
Amount requested: $10,000 USD
Budget breakdown:
Building the core integration $6,500
Handling large files $3,500
High-level architecture overview:
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Discovery: Sia is listed as a storage provider on Elisym’s discovery layer (built on Nostr), so any agent on the network can find it and request storage.
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Storage: The agent’s request is handled through the Sia Storage SDK - files are stored and retrieved exactly as they would be for any other Sia user, with indexd managing object metadata.
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Payment: Settlement happens on Elisym’s existing Solana rails. The agent pays in USDC, and a lightweight reconciliation service matches each payment to the Sia storage operation it covers.
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Proof of concept: A reference agent runs the full flow end-to-end - store, pay, retrieve so reviewers can see the integration working, not just described.
Security practices following.
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Data is encrypted on the agent’s side before it ever leaves for Sia. Sia never sees unencrypted files.
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Files are identified and verified by content hash, so we can always confirm what comes back is exactly what was stored, unchanged.
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Elisym never holds custody of agent funds beyond the brief moment needed to settle a job - payments go straight to the provider’s wallet.
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We’re following the patterns laid out in Sia’s own Development Guide for SDK and indexd integrations, rather than inventing our own approach.
Timeline (1 month):
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Weeks 1–2: Core SDK/indexd integration - agent can upload, pin, and retrieve data on Sia through Elisym’s discovery layer.
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Week 3: Payment reconciliation (USDC on Solana matched to completed storage jobs) and chunked transfer for large payloads.
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Week 4: Reference agent demonstrating the full store → pay → retrieve flow, plus documentation and final report.
Target user.
Developers building AI agents on the Elisym network who need storage without building a custom Sia integration. Secondarily, the broader Sia ecosystem gains a new, programmatic class of SDK-native users.
Plans after the grant.
Maintain the Gateway as a standard open-source Elisym provider adapter, iterate based on real agent usage data, and publish adoption metrics rather than pre-committing to volumes we can’t back up yet.
Potential risks.
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Agent-driven demand for storage is a hypothesis, not a proven market - mitigated by publishing real usage data instead of promising volumes.
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Sia SDK/indexd APIs may evolve during development - mitigated by a modular adapter design and an early documentation review as the first milestone.
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Small team bandwidth, given parallel work on other provider integrations - mitigated by scoping this to incremental, evaluable monthly milestones.
Development Information.
Fully open-source? Yes. All Gateway code will be open-source, in the same repository pattern as our other Elisym provider adapters.
Code link.
Monthly progress reports.
Yes. Monthly progress reports will be submitted to the Sia Foundation forum at the end of each month
Contact info
Email: [email protected]