Open Grant Proposal: hOUR Chain — Verifiable Creator-Rights Evidence on Filecoin

# Open Grant Proposal: hOUR Chain — Verifiable Creator-Rights Evidence on Filecoin

**Project Name:** hOUR Chain Filecoin Integration

**Proposal Category:** `Integrations`

**Individual or Entity Name:** Witching Hour Music and Art Collective (registered legal entity)

**Proposer:** `witchinghourartcollective`

**Project Repo(s):**

- https://github.com/witchinghourartcollective/hOUR-Chain
- Proposed grant-deliverables repository: `witchinghourartcollective/hour-chain-filecoin` (to be created as a public MIT/Apache-2 dual-licensed repository)

**Filecoin ecosystem affiliations:** None. The applicant contacted Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs on September 4, 2026 to request guidance on the appropriate funding and technical-support path; no employment, investment, advisory, contractual, or other formal affiliation is being claimed.

**Technical Sponsor:** None at submission. We welcome assignment or introduction to an appropriate technical reviewer.

**Do you agree to open source all grant-funded work under the MIT/Apache-2 dual license?:** Yes. All grant-funded specifications, adapters, SDK code, reference applications, tests, deployment tooling, and documentation will be published in the dedicated public `hour-chain-filecoin` repository under both MIT and Apache-2.0. The existing hOUR Chain repository will remain a public reference implementation with its own licensing boundary; no closed-source deliverable will be used to satisfy a grant milestone.

# Project Summary

hOUR Chain is a pre-alpha creator-rights, provenance, access, and settlement protocol being developed by Witching Hour Music and Art Collective. It models creator identity, musical works and recordings, contributor and rights-split graphs, signed provenance events, access credentials, agent permissions, and settlement instructions. Phase 1 uses Base as its canonical EVM settlement network, while Phigit OS, Witching Hour App, Witching-hOUR-Live-App, and the WHM onchain agent act as clients and adapters. Filecoin storage is planned but is not currently deployed.

This project will make Filecoin the verifiable evidence and retrieval layer for hOUR Chain. Grant-funded work will define a privacy-aware evidence-bundle format; store encrypted or intentionally public creator-rights evidence through Filecoin Onchain Cloud; record content identifiers, storage status, and proof references in hOUR Chain events; and provide independent verification and retrieval tooling. The primary implementation path will use the maintained Synapse SDK and Filecoin Onchain Cloud components, including Proof of Data Possession-backed warm storage, Filecoin Pay, and retrieval services. Base will anchor compact commitments and settlement events, while Filecoin will hold and continuously verify the larger evidence artifacts those commitments reference.

The result will be an open, reusable integration that other creator, media, provenance, and agentic applications can adopt without using the rest of the Witching Hour product stack. The grant will fund the complete Filecoin integration boundary across hOUR Chain, not general company operations, unrelated cloud bills, Lightning recovery, or development that does not advance Filecoin usage.

## Impact

Creator-rights evidence is fragmented across local drives, private messages, cloud folders, distributor dashboards, split sheets, project files, and settlement records. Hashing a document onto a chain can show that a byte sequence existed, but it does not ensure that the underlying evidence remains retrievable, that access is handled safely, or that a future verifier can connect it to a versioned rights and provenance history. Centralized storage also creates deletion, account-lockout, vendor, and auditability risks.

hOUR Chain will pair compact onchain commitments with retrievable Filecoin evidence bundles. This gives creators and collaborators a practical way to preserve authorship evidence, contributor approvals, rights-split history, release metadata, performance records, and settlement receipts while minimizing onchain disclosure. The proposed verifier will allow an authorized party to confirm bundle integrity, matching content identifiers, expected hOUR Chain events, and available Filecoin storage proofs without trusting Witching Hour's application database.

Success will give the Filecoin ecosystem a documented creator-rights reference integration and bring new media/evidence workloads to Filecoin Onchain Cloud. Failure to build this layer leaves hOUR Chain dependent on centralized evidence storage and weakens the long-term verifiability of creator claims. The work is also reusable beyond music for other provenance-heavy media, cultural archives, licensing workflows, and agent-generated records.

## Outcomes

The project will deliver:

1. A public dual-licensed `hour-chain-filecoin` repository with reproducible setup, architecture decisions, threat model, examples, and continuous tests.
2. A versioned evidence-bundle specification covering canonical manifests, content identifiers, encryption metadata, rights and provenance references, retention state, and redaction/tombstone signaling without claiming that immutable storage can erase previously published data.
3. A TypeScript storage adapter using the Synapse SDK to upload, download, inspect, and verify evidence bundles through Filecoin Onchain Cloud.
4. A local/test adapter so developers can run the integration without spending funds, plus Calibration-network configuration for end-to-end testing before production use.
5. A verifier CLI and library that validates bundle hashes/CIDs, manifest signatures, hOUR Chain event references, retrieval results, and available Filecoin proof/status information.
6. hOUR Chain SDK and service hooks that create evidence events, persist Filecoin references, and expose verified read-model status to client applications.
7. A reference creator workflow covering work registration, contributor/split approval evidence, a provenance update, and a settlement receipt.
8. A small creator pilot with measured uploads, retrieval checks, verification success, latency, failure modes, and cost per evidence bundle.
9. Public integration documentation, maintenance guidance, security limitations, and a final report with adoption and Filecoin-usage metrics.

Project success will be measured by:

- 100 or more valid evidence bundles created during development and pilot testing;
- at least 10 pilot creator/collaborator users invited, with onboarding and consent documented;
- at least 95% successful scheduled retrieval-and-verification checks during the final pilot period, with failures categorized and published;
- deterministic verification of every accepted bundle against its hOUR Chain event reference;
- a documented privacy review showing that raw private creator evidence is encrypted before upload and that keys are never stored with the public manifest;
- published storage volume, retrieval volume, proof/status coverage, latency, and cost measurements; and
- a clean-room setup test in which a developer can reproduce the reference workflow from the public documentation.

## Data Onboarding

These are conservative pilot targets rather than claims of existing Filecoin usage. Final onboarding will depend on creator consent, test results, and grant timing.

- Month 1: 10 GiB
- Month 3: 100 GiB
- Month 6: 500 GiB
- Month 12: 2 TiB

The first workloads will include rights manifests, signed approval records, release and performance metadata, settlement receipts, project exports selected by their owners, and test media/evidence artifacts. Private material will be encrypted before upload; public metadata will be minimized. The project will publish actual onboarding figures and distinguish test data from creator-owned production evidence.

## Adoption, Reach, and Growth Strategies

The initial audience is independent musicians, producers, collaborators, small labels, artist collectives, and developers building creator-rights or provenance tools. Witching Hour Music and Art Collective will begin with its own releases and production workflows, then invite a small group of collaborators to test work registration, split evidence, version updates, retrieval, and verification.

The first 10 users will receive founder-led onboarding and a defined pilot checklist. Findings will be converted into documentation, example bundles, and product improvements. The path to 100 users will use repeatable onboarding inside Witching Hour App, public developer documentation, integrations with the wider Witching Hour ecosystem, creator-education material, and partnerships with small labels or collectives. The open module will allow projects outside hOUR Chain to adopt the evidence format and verifier.

Adoption reporting will count activated users, valid bundles, distinct works/releases, verified retrievals, Filecoin storage volume, returning users, and integration usage. Marketing impressions will not be treated as product adoption.

## Development Roadmap

The schedule assumes a grant agreement is fully executed by October 31, 2026. If contracting occurs later, each completion date will shift by the same interval. No grant-funded work will begin before the agreement is signed by both parties.

### Milestone 1 — Specification, licensing boundary, and security design

**Target completion:** November 30, 2026
**Team:** One founder/protocol lead, with scoped external security/privacy review
**Funding:** $8,000

Deliverables:

- Create the public dual-licensed grant repository with contribution and release policies.
- Publish the Filecoin integration architecture and hOUR Chain interface boundary.
- Define evidence-bundle v0.1, canonical serialization, identifier rules, encryption envelope, key-separation requirements, consent states, and threat model.
- Define the mapping between hOUR Chain events, Base commitments, Filecoin content identifiers, Filecoin Onchain Cloud data sets, and proof/status records.
- Publish an acceptance-test plan and pilot measurement plan.

Acceptance criteria:

- Schemas validate example work, recording, split-approval, provenance, and settlement-receipt bundles.
- No secret, private key, plaintext decryption key, or production credential appears in the repository or example data.
- A reviewer can trace each planned grant deliverable to an automated or documented acceptance check.

### Milestone 2 — Filecoin storage, retrieval, and verification core

**Target completion:** December 31, 2026
**Team:** One founder/implementation lead, with focused reviewer support
**Funding:** $15,000

Deliverables:

- Implement the TypeScript Filecoin Onchain Cloud adapter using the maintained Synapse SDK.
- Support Calibration-network upload/download, funding and cost checks, data-set creation, content-identifier capture, and storage status inspection.
- Implement encrypted bundle packaging with pluggable key management; keys remain outside Filecoin and outside public manifests.
- Implement verifier CLI/library for manifest integrity, signature results, CID/reference matching, retrieval tests, and proof/status reporting.
- Provide deterministic fixtures, local/test adapter, integration tests, failure injection, retry policy, and cost guardrails.

Acceptance criteria:

- A fresh environment can package, upload, retrieve, and verify all reference bundle types on Calibration.
- Altered content, mismatched identifiers, missing references, and failed retrievals produce explicit fail-closed results.
- Test output records storage and retrieval costs without exposing wallet or credential material.

### Milestone 3 — End-to-end hOUR Chain integration

**Target completion:** January 31, 2027
**Team:** One founder/protocol and application integration lead, with focused reviewer support
**Funding:** $15,000

Deliverables:

- Add hOUR Chain SDK hooks for evidence creation, storage requests, verification state, and retrieval receipts.
- Implement the mapping from hOUR Chain's signed event envelope to Filecoin evidence references and compact Base commitments.
- Add adapter interfaces for Phigit OS and Witching Hour App without placing grant deliverables behind private code.
- Deliver a public reference workflow covering registration, split approval, provenance update, retrieval, independent verification, and settlement-receipt evidence.
- Publish deployment configuration, observability events, recovery procedures, and a compatibility matrix.

Acceptance criteria:

- The public reference application completes the workflow without depending on a private Witching Hour service.
- A second machine or clean environment independently verifies the bundle and its event references.
- Automated tests cover authorization boundaries, duplicate/replayed events, tampered evidence, unavailable storage, and inconsistent Base/Filecoin references.

### Milestone 4 — Creator pilot, hardening, documentation, and final report

**Target completion:** March 15, 2027
**Team:** One founder/pilot and engineering lead, plus scoped external security/reliability review
**Funding:** $12,000

Deliverables:

- Run a consented pilot using real or owner-approved creator evidence.
- Reach at least 100 valid evidence bundles and invite at least 10 creator/collaborator users.
- Operate scheduled retrieval-and-verification checks and publish aggregated reliability, latency, storage, retrieval, and cost results.
- Resolve critical findings from security/privacy/reliability review or document explicit residual risks.
- Publish onboarding instructions, API/SDK reference, operations guide, maintenance plan, demo, and final grant report.

Acceptance criteria:

- Final report distinguishes test, pilot, and production data and reports actual Filecoin usage.
- At least 95% of scheduled retrieval-and-verification checks succeed during the measured final pilot period, or the report documents root cause and remediation for any shortfall.
- All grant-funded source, specifications, tests, documentation, and reproducible deployment instructions remain publicly accessible under MIT/Apache-2.

## Total Budget Requested

| Milestone # | Description | Deliverables | Completion Date | Funding |
|---|---|---|---|---:|
| 1 | Specification and security design | Public repository, schemas, architecture, threat model, test plan | November 30, 2026 | $8,000 |
| 2 | Filecoin core integration | Synapse adapter, encryption envelope, verifier, tests | December 31, 2026 | $15,000 |
| 3 | hOUR Chain integration | SDK hooks, Base/Filecoin mapping, reference workflow, deployment guidance | January 31, 2027 | $15,000 |
| 4 | Pilot and hardening | Creator pilot, reliability/security review, docs, demo, final metrics report | March 15, 2027 | $12,000 |
| | **Total** | | | **$50,000** |

## Maintenance and Upgrade Plans

Witching Hour Music and Art Collective will maintain the public module as the supported Filecoin integration for hOUR Chain. Maintenance will include dependency and contract-address updates, compatibility tests against supported Synapse SDK and Filecoin Onchain Cloud releases, security advisories, issue triage, reproducible releases, and migration notes when schemas or underlying services change.

After the grant, ordinary maintenance will be supported through Witching Hour's product-development budget and future paid creator pilots. Any later grant request would cover a separately defined expansion rather than unfinished work from this proposal. The integration will remain modular so outside maintainers and projects can reuse the evidence format and verifier without adopting the entire Witching Hour stack.

# Team

## Team Members

- Fletcher Vaughn — Founder and project lead; protocol design, implementation, integration, creator-pilot operations, documentation, and grant reporting.
- Scoped independent reviewers/contractors may be engaged for security, privacy, and reliability review. Any contributor added to the funded work will be identified publicly in the project repository and grant updates.

## Team Member LinkedIn Profiles

LinkedIn profile omitted because the founder's existing LinkedIn account is currently inaccessible despite recovery attempts. Identity and entity documentation can be provided privately during diligence and contracting.

## Team Website

https://witchinghourmac.com

## Relevant Experience

Witching Hour Music and Art Collective combines direct creator and music-production experience with active development of creator-facing software and onchain infrastructure. Fletcher Vaughn is building hOUR Chain and the surrounding Witching Hour ecosystem from the operational perspective of a music producer and artist who must manage creative provenance, collaborators, rights splits, releases, payments, live production, and durable evidence.

The existing public hOUR Chain repository defines protocol actors, trust boundaries, identifiers, signed event envelopes, creator-rights records, settlement instructions, access credentials, agent permissions, security requirements, and integration boundaries. Related Witching Hour projects provide practical environments in which to test evidence capture, verification, wallet/agent workflows, and creator-facing UX. The team is deliberately presenting hOUR Chain as pre-alpha and Filecoin as planned rather than claiming a deployment that does not yet exist.

## Team Code Repositories

- https://github.com/witchinghourartcollective/hOUR-Chain
- https://github.com/witchinghourartcollective/agent-framework
- Additional repositories will be linked only where they are public, relevant, and safe for grant review.

# Additional Information

The applicant learned about the Open Grants Program while researching the appropriate Filecoin funding path for hOUR Chain's decentralized creator-evidence archive and then contacted Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs for routing guidance.

**Grant contact:** fletchervaughn@witchinghourmac.com

The current hOUR Chain repository is public, but public visibility alone is not being represented as an open-source license. The dedicated grant repository will provide a clear MIT/Apache-2 boundary for every funded deliverable. The proposal does not request funding for unrelated infrastructure recovery or claim that Filecoin integration is already deployed.

No implementation file or test path is named; start by reading the hOUR Chain repository and the Milestone 1 specification, architecture, and acceptance criteria. The proposed work spans a new hour-chain-filecoin repository, a TypeScript Synapse SDK adapter, verification tooling, and hOUR Chain hooks. Done requires the listed milestones, reproducible tests, secure example data, and documented acceptance checks.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.