Neon Foundation Announces the Early Builders Program: Get Involved and Grow Your Project

The Neon Foundation will allocate 1% of its total NEON token supply (10 million tokens), towards the Early Builders Program to be spread across qualified projects built on Neon EVM Devnet.

Neon Foundation is launching the Early Builders Program with the goal of accelerating the rapid growth of the Neon Ecosystem. The program begins on 28/02/2023 and will be an enriching learning experience that draws upon hard work from both program participants and the Neon Foundation.

The Early Builders Program is perfect for those interested in becoming pioneering developers of the Neon Ecosystem by building dApps, key infrastructure, and development tools for Neon EVM. Participating projects will be incentivized to build on Neon EVM Devnet with rewards. We see fostering active development on Devnet as an important way to continuously test the main functionalities of Neon EVM as the platform matures.

What Projects Can Apply to the Early Builders Program?

Our primary focus is on finding applicants keen to help strengthen the Neon Ecosystem. We’ll prioritize projects that have the potential to accelerate the adoption of Neon, increase usability of the platform, generate value for users, and drive economic activity in the Neon Network.

In the Early Builders Program, we especially look for projects that:

• Demonstrate real-life use cases that provide value to the Neon ecosystem.
• Contribute to the open-source ecosystem codebase.
• Have robust existing communities demonstrated by strong weekly active users, TVL, and active wallets.
• Exhibit substantial and progressive community growth, showing that there is a clear interest in the usage of their new product or service.
• Actively create tools that enable other types of projects to build on top of Neon EVM.

The program’s current grant offerings cover the following project areas:

• Developer tooling that addresses missing Neon EVM functionalities
• Infrastructure: wallets, oracles, and indexers
• Applications: novel DeFi projects that aren’t simple swaps, launchpads, existing projects with robust communities and users, projects that display innovative solutions, Ethereum and Solana interoperability tooling, DAO tooling, and NFT tooling

While we want to support all community members and enthusiasts with a variety of project use cases, we aren’t seeking NFT projects for the Early Builders Program since the ecosystem still lacks the tooling and infrastructure that NFTs require. However, the program is more than willing to accept developers and community members that can develop the missing functionalities required for NFTs on Neon EVM.

How to Apply for the Early Builders Program

Before we, the Neon Foundation, officially kick off the Early Builders Program, we’ll submit a proposal to the Neon DAO. Once/if the proposal is accepted, we’ll release an Early Builders Program sign-up form and request that applicants:

1. Follow Neon Labs on Twitter.

2. Like and retweet our post covering the Early Builders Program.

Along with the sign-up form, we’ll be providing an email address and Discord channel for applicants or community members who have questions about the program.

How Tokens Will Be Released

The Neon Foundation is reserving an initial 1% of our total NEON token supply for the Early Builders Program (10,000,000 NEON). Depending on the number of quality applicants registering for the program, we may increase funding to give deserving projects a boost.

Funding for each program participant will be paid in NEON and will be released in four stages according to the completion of project milestones evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Milestones must be completed in the order specified below.

Milestone 1

Deploy your dApp on Neon EVM Devnet and ensure it meets the acceptance criteria listed in the Acceptance Criteria for dApp Deployment Milestones section below.

Milestone 2

Conduct marketing activities with the Neon Foundation team across three required areas: Twitter Spaces, Tweets announcing partnership, and Medium articles.

Milestone 3

Successfully deploy your dApp to Neon EVM Mainnet and ensure it meets the acceptance criteria listed in the Acceptance Criteria for dApp Deployment Milestones section below.

Milestone 4

Meet or exceed a predefined user activity target on your dApp. The Neon Foundation team will assess and align on an appropriate user activity KPI that suits the nature of the dApp. The KPI review for Milestone 4 will be done two months from the date of dApp deployment and can include assessment of:

• User activity: daily active users, weekly active users, monthly active users, new users, unique addresses
• Transaction statistics: daily number of transactions, weekly number of transactions, daily transaction volume, weekly transaction volume
• Total Value Locked (TVL)

NEON tokens allocated to the Early Builders Program will have a six-month vesting period.

Acceptance Criteria for dApp Deployment Milestones

The assessment of Milestone 1 (Devnet deployment) and Milestone 3 (Mainnet deployment) require dApp teams to meet the following set of acceptance criteria. Once The Neon Foundation team has confirmed that the acceptance criteria have been met through testing and cross-checking, the associated milestones will be marked as complete.

Devnet Deployment Acceptance Criteria (Milestone 1)

The Neon Foundation will only accept a dApp’s Devnet implementation on Neon EVM after confirming that all contract components and functionalities are working as expected and transactions appear in Neonscan.

1. The dApp team should provide The Neon Foundation with following information prior to the Devnet deployment assessment:

• Scope and goals of testing
• Description of testing scenarios focusing on business use cases
• Link to Github repo
• Testing workflow or actions to run the tests
• Detailed testing results and associated logs
• Access to dApp UI
• Confirmation that deployed contracts on devnet have been verified on Neonscan

2. Teams must confirm that all tests ran successfully and results are logged in detail

3. Teams must confirm that their dApp is deployed on Neon EVM Devnet and not on local environment

4. If applicable, teams must indicate any external integrations with Chainlink, The Graph, etc.

5. Provision of an audit report by a reputable third-party smart contract auditor

Mainnet Deployment Acceptance Criteria (Milestone 3)

In alignment with the acceptance criteria for Milestone 1, The Neon Foundation will only accept a dApp’s Mainnet implementation on Neon EVM after confirming that all contract components and functionalities are working as expected.

• Teams must provide their dApps Mainnet contract addresses
• Teams must verify that the Mainnet contracts match the Devnet contracts tested by Neon Labs Integrations Engineering team. The Neon Foundation team will further review the smart contract code and ensure that there are no differences to what was deployed / approved on Devnet
• Teams should provide any additional test reports with logs
• A list of differences between the Devnet deployment and Mainnet deployment (if any)

What Kind of Support You Can Expect From the Neon Foundation

The Neon Foundation will provide three tracks of support to participants of the Early Builders Program to help them reach their full potential. The three tracks, dubbed Technical, Community, and Ecosystem, are designed to help project teams overcome technical hurdles as well as grow vibrant communities and partnerships.

Support you can expect with each track includes:

Technical

• Dedicated chat support with builders
• Regular office hours with the program’s tech support lead
• Launch support with materials
• Regular individual check-ins

Community

• Collaboration on events, meetups, webinars, and AMA sessions
• Guidance on community building
• Integration with the Solana community

Ecosystem

• Intro to relevant blockchain ecosystem players (dApps, users, partners, etc.)
• Joint announcements / non-technical chat room
• The Neon Foundation will be launching a separate grants program

About Neon EVM

Neon EVM is a first-of-its-kind EVM-compatibility solution built on the Solana blockchain. The platform allows Ethereum-like transactions to be processed on Solana, allowing solidity-based dApps to tap into Solana’s network benefits.

Ethereum dApp developers can create user experiences that take full advantage of Solana’s low fees, high transaction speeds, and parallel transaction execution capabilities. Developers can deploy their existing Solidity smart contracts to Neon EVM with no code changes, and create new contracts using tools they’re familiar with from the Ethereum ecosystem. From an end-user perspective, the dApps they know and love will function the same but will offer an improved cost and speed performance.

Think of Neon EVM as a portal that brings the best Ethereum solutions to Solana, and gives the community the ultimate foundation to develop, grow, access, and share their dApps.

Get started by checking out our developer resources.