RFP: Another programming language for smart contracts

The Cardano Foundation is pleased to announce a new request for proposals (RFP), open for applications via email until 31 August 2020.

Our last RFP for the creation of a stake pool dashboard was a resounding success. We selected five innovative projects— instead of three — as recipients of our US$1,000 per month grant.

Now, with the rollout of Goguen and the capability to write and deploy smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain, the Cardano Foundation will be requesting a second round of proposals. This RFP will be focused on making it easier to deploy smart contracts using the Extended UTXO (unspent transaction output) Ledger Model, which participants may familiarize themselves with here (see ‘Section 3: EUTXO-1: Enhanced scripting’).

Through this RFP, we aim to grow the developer adoption of Cardano as a smart contracts platform. We are looking for groups, companies, or even individuals who can achieve this by allowing developers to write smart contracts in multiple programming languages and expand the range of languages beyond Plutus, our core language, and diversifying the pool of developers who can build atop Cardano.

The primary goal of this RFP is to allow developers from other platforms to use other programming languages in addition to Haskell to write and deploy decentralized applications (DApps). Our secondary focus is to ease the migration and porting of DApps from other platforms to run on — or interact with — DApps on Cardano.

The optimal solution should seek to accelerate and broaden the developer opportunities to bring smart contract developer tools for Cardano available in the market, and focus on bringing developers and DApps from other platforms to Cardano through external integrations.

RFP grant

The Cardano Foundation will finance this project in the form of a grant. Below are our basic terms and conditions:

1. Anyone is welcome to submit a proposal;
2. We expect detailed proposals, which must contain at least:

• A description of the team and the team members’ backgrounds;
• The scope of the project or solution;
• The timeline of the project;
• The costs in US dollars associated with building and implementing your project;
• References for prior work;
• There is no limit to the creativity of your proposal.

3. One or more proposals will be selected based on the overall quality of the proposals;

4. The Cardano Foundation’s selection criteria will be public and brief with regard to the three best proposals, and private and very brief with regard to other proposals;

5. The selected proposal(s) shall enter into contractual negotiations with the Cardano Foundation. In case these negotiations do not lead to a contract, the Cardano Foundation reserves the right to revert to other proposals;

6. The Cardano Foundation reserves the right to amend this RFP as and when it deems fit. There will be no further correspondence, no recourse, and no complaint procedure if the Foundation rescinds this offer;

7. Interested parties may submit questions prior to applying. The Cardano Foundation will respond to prior questions exclusively via email.

You can send your questions until 3 August 2020, and the deadline for submission of the proposal is 31 August 2020. By submitting your proposals, you agree to the above terms and conditions.

Please send all your prior questions and complete proposals to rfp@cardanofoundation.org.

Stay safe, keep building and we look forward to receiving your proposals.