Small Grant: StreamWeave

Grants Inactive
1

Small Grant

Introduction

Project Name:
StreamWeave MVP

Name of the organization or individual submitting the proposal:
Hridyansh

Describe your project.

StreamWeave MVP is a simplified proof‑of‑concept for decentralized video streaming. The MVP will demonstrate the core workflow of:

  1. Uploading a video file.
  2. Transcoding it into adaptive bitrate renditions using Livepeer.
  3. Encrypting and storing the renditions on Sia.
  4. Serving the content through a lightweight origin proxy.

This MVP will not yet include advanced features such as NFT/subscription gating or large‑scale CDN integration. Instead, it will focus on proving the end‑to‑end pipeline of Sia storage + Livepeer transcoding + secure playback.

The outcome will be a minimal web interface where a user can upload a video, have it processed, and then play it back from Sia storage with basic access control.

How does the projected outcome serve the Foundation’s mission of user‑owned data?

The MVP directly demonstrates user‑owned data by ensuring:

  • All video files are encrypted before being uploaded to Sia.
  • Storage contracts are made with Sia hosts, not centralized providers.
  • Only the uploader (or authorized viewers) can decrypt and play the video.

This aligns with the Sia Foundation’s mission by showing a practical, user‑friendly application of decentralized storage where creators retain full control of their content.

Compliance

Are you a resident of any jurisdiction on that list?
No

Will your payment bank account be located in any jurisdiction on that list?
No

Grant Specifics

Amount Requested:
$10,000 USD

Category Amount (USD) Description
Part‑time Lead Developer / Architect $5,000 20 hrs/week × 10 weeks @ $25/hr. Covers architecture, integration, and server maintenance
Outsourced Specialist Support $2,000 Contracted help for frontend polish and DevOps setup
Infrastructure & Tooling $1,000 Cloud VM for origin proxy, domain, SSL, monitoring
Livepeer Usage Credits $1,000 Transcoding costs for MVP testing
Sia Storage & Repair $500 Storage costs for test content (~5 TB)
Contingency $500 Buffer for unexpected costs
Total $10,000

Goals and Timeline

Goals:

  • Deliver a working MVP that demonstrates the Sia + Livepeer pipeline.
  • Provide a minimal web interface for upload and playback.
  • Document the architecture and publish open‑source code.

Timeline (3 months):

Month Milestone Deliverable Budget
1 Core setup Repository initialized, basic documentation, Sia integration for encrypted storage $500: Sia Credits + $1000 LivePeer credits = $1500
2 Transcoding pipeline Livepeer integration completed, ABR renditions stored on Sia $5000 Developer fees (to accommodate the server buying)
3 Playback demo Origin proxy deployed, simple web player connected, public demo and documentation published $1000 Infrastructure + $2000 Polishing + $500 contingency (if cost incurred) = $3000 - $3500

Potential Risks

  • Integration complexity between Sia and Livepeer → Mitigation: modular design with clear APIs.
  • Service cost overruns if usage is higher than expected → Mitigation: strict usage limits during MVP.
  • Adoption risk if UI is too minimal → Mitigation: focus on clear documentation and extensibility.

Development Information

Will all of your project’s code be open‑source?
Yes, all code will be open‑sourced under the MIT License.

Link where code will be accessible for review:
Gravity-3d/StreamWeave: Privacy and Freedom respecting video streaming platform using Sia, Livepeer, and Theta.

Do you agree to submit monthly progress reports?
Yes

Contact Info

Email: [email protected]
Other contact methods: Forum: @Gravity-3d | Discord: @x73d

P.S: Please do criticize this project in the comments, how it may be improved, what other projects tried to tackle this, and what setbacks they faced. I know this topic has had many unsuccessful attempts, like Decast.live, but I believe the cross-chain integration and modular structure proposed by me will allow me to actually pull this off with better results than them.

2

Hello,

So a few things:

  • The status quo for new developers, generally speaking, is for them to do a small grant 1st for a MVP unless they have a good argument/justification on requesting more.
  • The grants are generally requested to avoid cross-chain related things, grants that require integration with non-Sia blockchains. So if you are doing cross-ecosystem, you should be specific on what your interacting with to ensure that risk is properly judged, as history has found that anything outside the communities control to help with would be deemed a grant risk.
  • You should clarify if you are going to run this as a hosted service. Quite frankly, anything that is complicated like video transcoding or anything like youtube would probably warrant an explanation of any infrastructure required and if the grantee is going to be operating that infra, and if they don’t have to, to explain why.
    • A important thing to understand is that grants that are effectively infrastructure rather an app you can download, do need someone to run that infra realistically for the community, and the grantee would be the obvious choice.
    • Additionally as you are requesting a subsidy for usage on other chains, I would explain how that ends at the end user being able to stream and what is going to be abstracted away b/c no one wants to deal with crypto, and any wallets being involved would be a large barrier to adoption at present.

So this entire project seems like a blur between an app? possibly and infrastructure, and outside the fact this should probably be a MVP 1st (small grant), it should be reviewed on how its going to operate for the end user (not power user).

Lastly, the ecosystem is in a bit of a transition phase right now, and you should be aware of a new effort indexd, when released, will become the focus of the ecosystem for new apps and adoption. So while you can build with renterd today, you should keep any architectural plans with that in mind.

Kudos.

3

Hi,

So, to answer your questions: -

  1. Yes, I assumed that which is why I originally proposed with a small grant. But based on the scale of the project, and the aim which is to create an entire product + the necessary infrastructure to run it, warrants a standard grant. The hiring of professionals, the basic centralized infrastructure, and the outsourcing were all very difficult to fit inside a small grant.

  2. As I mentioned in the initial proposal, I plan to keep this thing entirely modular. The livepeer section only handles transcoding, Sia only handles storage, and Theta only handles content delivery. They would talk with each other only through APIs built for each section, which is why I also mentioned that I am building this as an infrastructure also. As such, if one chain fails, the only thing that would need repairing is that part. Supposed livepeer fails, as such I will just integrate another chain which can handle transcoding, like Akaash. But the other parts will still talk to the same API, so for them nothing changes. As a game developer, I do have experience modularising things, so that it is easy to repair.

  3. Yes of course I would be the one running this service initially. This proposal actually covers both the infrastructure and the first app that would use the infrastructure. It is like if the VUP and the S5 protocol it uses were both made by the same developer within the same grant. And yes, what would be abstracted away would be the entire crypto wallet system. to explain

    • The end producer (creator) would upload the video, which would be transcoded by the LivePeer system, stored on the Sia storage system, and then delivered by the Theta System, all paid by the Organization (me), and would be the entirety of our necessary costs.
    • We would also allow people to easily onboard on the Theta Network (another project), the Sia Network (SiaVault) and LivePeer Network (another project), by abstracting away the cypto mess and giving them pure fiat income for the crypto they have earned, while taking a fixed percent for our efforts. This would in part pay for our costs.
    • When the end consumer (viewer) would buy a subscription for less buffering, higher quality, or just to support the creator, that would also pay us, covering a part of our costs.
    • When the user donates to a specific creator, then again, we will take a part to cover our expenses.
    • The final source of income for the app would be crypto itself, such as staking. For example, we would also buy theta, which is the governing currency, to earn passive tfuel which can help subsidize the CDN costs. Similarly, if we see a node performing well, we will stake tfuel on it to make it an elite node, which will allow that node to earn more, and in turn allow us to earn more by taking a part. But all this income and cost would be for the app, not the infrastructure. The infrastructure would provide developers ways to use this workflow but not handle any of their money.

So overall, this proposal is not blur, but instead it covers both the infrastructure and the app. The infrastructure would provide developers a way to make apps using this decentralized transcoding + storage + delivery network, while paying in fiat, how the developers mange the earning and expenses is up to them, the infrastructure would just give them the bill. It’s like pre-paid call service, it doesn’t care how much you earned using the call centre advertising, it will just consume your talk time and inform you when it is going to finish.

But the app cares about all this. It’s like when one of the clients create a partnership with the call centre, or they are both owned by the same person. The app is the one that required the UI/UX and all that, but I would also opensource the infra used to build it. It’s like when a game launches with a new multiplayer network, but then allows other games to use it too, or like how Google launches its own Pixel, but allows other phones to use Android too.

Overall, this is a pretty hefty project, and in fact would cover the entirety of SiaVault inside itself, along with 2 others like it. The main reason I submitted it here is because this is the most active community of these 3, so this was the place I could get the most critique about this idea overall, while also being able to explain myself in a better way. Because in most of these communities, I wait up to 6 weeks after submitting my application, then they give me a list of questions to answer, then I submit and again wait for up to 6 to 8 weeks, before the next list. So by submitting here, I am able to quicky explain myself in a better way, and also re-iterate on the idea if needed. Now it does not mean that I submitted here only for critique, I am looking forward to get funding from here, but yes, this is one of the prime reasons I posted this here.

P.S: What does Kudos mean?

4

It means “thank you” in this particular context.

By the way, you seem to keep self-voting. I’m trying my best to be objective, but man, you’re pushing your luck :rofl:

5

Based on experience from my own journey grant-wise, this does feel like something that is the reason why the small-grants guideline is in place.

I am also seeing a lot of badly communicated complexity between a lot of moving parts. And the more complex it is, the harder it is for anyone to operate the infrastructure.

So my recommendation would be to figure out what you can do within 3 months for a max of $10k USD and start there. Because this is reminiscent of some of the complexity in my 1st grant where not everything was figured out.

Thus I do think a lot of this should be discussed on the forums as an idea or on discord because I am aware of how some other chains have communities that are a lot more disorganized in communicating, and we will be able to help you a lot better in figuring out how to tackle your ideas.

Kudos.

6

I self vote because I have seen it on places like reddit, and so I assumed if you do know that i self-voted, then it should be no problem. But if it creates any problems, I will stop.

7

I see, then I will also start with the small grant first. I just had a few questions: -

  • Is there like a limit to what I can ask each month, or can I divide the funding to fit my development. Like I was thinking a 2 + 6 + 2 funding, if it is possible of course.

  • Could ye send the discord invite here? The link on the website seems expired, and I sent a friend request to @mecsbecs on discord to get an invite, but it was expectedly ignored.

  • Any tips for the proposal? And should I edit this one to be a small grant proposal, or should I make a new one?

Kudos!

8

Hi @Gravity-3d, thank you for your grant proposal and yes, it is our recommendation that for a first grant you submit a focused small grant. You can revise this proposal to match the guidelines for a small grant proposal (template here), and be sure to rename the post with “Small Grant” in the title.

Ordinarily it’s preferred to distribute the work and the corresponding funding as equally as possible so you’re able to make your milestones without difficulty. However with a solid explanation in your budget justification, the Grants Committee may be open to other ways of breaking down your fund allocation.

If you can make your revisions to this proposal to match the Small Grants guideline and incorporating the feedback here by tomorrow Thursday, September 25th by 10am EST then this proposal will be presented at next week’s Committee meeting.

And yes, an unknown friend request on Discord without a common server does often get ignored from me but I’ll bring this to our community manager’s attention to see if we can get your access to The Sia Foundation server sorted. You can also try accessing again at this invite link.

(Thanks @pcfreak30 & @mike76 for the discussion above!)

9

Hello @Gravity-3d,

I am trying to determine what the conflict with you joining the discord server is. I’ve double-checked and I do not see any user by the name “x73d” or “Gravity-3d” that has ever attempted to join our Discord server.
Can you please provide your discord username? (not your display name)

Regards,
Kino

10

Screenshot 2025-09-24 222710
Screenshot 2025-09-24 222710491×697 83.3 KB

As I said, I was not able to access the invite link, you can see the image in the other reply.

11

Screenshot 2025-09-24 222628
Screenshot 2025-09-24 2226281905×915 29.3 KB

Same problem again unfortunately. I have included my profile in the other reply, you can see it to try and invite directly on Discord

12

Hello

This user is not blocked from joining the server nor have we ever seen this username attempt to join.

The reason you may seeing this message is possibly because you may be using a VPN.
Discord (the app, a service not managed by us) does full IP bans when a user gets banned from the service, if you are using the same VPN service as someone else used that got banned it could cause you to be unable to connect.

If you are not using a VPN, it’s very rare but possible that someone else on your city block could have been banned from Discord.

If you could please add the discord user “Kinomora”, I could work with you more closely to see what I can do to assist you.

Regards,
Kino

13

Hey!

No, I am not using a VPN, and my discord is working perfectly fine in case of everything else, so I assume it is a problem with this specific server, since I joined a new server barely a week ago. I have sent a friend request either way, so we can discuss it there.

Kudos!

14

Noting here that this proposal will not be presented at next week’s Committee meeting at the proposer’s request

15

@Gravity-3d Since there has been no activity for this proposal in over 30 days, it will be moved to the ‘Inactive’ section of the Forum. Should anything change, please let me know.

16

I thought this was already moved to another category, because of the problems with multiple crypto networks being used