Web3 Foundation Grants — Wave One Winners
We recently announced the W3F Grants program, and we’d like to thank all the teams and community members who have applied with ideas on how to improve the growing Web3 and Polkadot ecosystems. We’re excited by the number of talented teams working collaboratively to build a decentralized and open internet. The purpose of the grants program is to allow teams to build cool technology. The Web3 Foundation is happy to fund the project if it falls within our areas of interest. Check out a non-exhaustive list of ideas that we would consider providing grants for here.
Today we have the pleasure of announcing the first round of grants we funded. We believe that each of the winners will be providing something unique and important to the ecosystem. Moreover, each project will be open source and therefore free for anyone to use.
More funding is available, so we kindly welcome more teams to step forward and submit their ideas. Details of how to apply can be found on our grants page, but we have also included a quick recap below.
Winning teams
One of the themes that stands out with these grants is our commitment to making new user on boarding as easy as possible. A Polkadot wallet is a gateway to the Web3 ecosystem: they can provide features such as staking, governance, and identity across multiple chains.
An open source block explorer and an open source scalable cluster are also important pieces of any decentralized blockchain ecosystem. We want the community to have the tools they need to verify chain data (let’s not blindly trust!), as well as, having the ability to deploy a local solution for handling requests to a dApp (you don’t need to rely upon a single company!).
Finally, there are also a number of projects that relate to improving the security, posture, and performance of our technology.
- Chainhammer — Multi-chain performance testing tool (GitHub)
- ChainSafe — Polkadot Runtime Environment in Go (via an RFP) (GitHub)
- Soramitsu — Polkadot Runtime Environment in C++ (via an RFP) (GitHub)
- OpenNetSys — Polkadot Runtime Environment in Go (via an RFP) (GitHub)
- Polkascan — Open Source Block Explorer (GitHub)
- Polkawallet — Mobile Wallet (GitHub)
- Validators — Open Source Scalable Cluster (GitHub)
- Enzyme — Browser extension wallet
- Speckle OS — Browser extension wallet (GitHub)
- Noise Explorer — Rust code generator for formally verified (Noise/ cryptographic) handshakes (GitHub)
- Protos — Open Source Node Explorer
- Supercomputing Systems — Substrate Transaction Privacy using Intel SGX (GitHub)
This is just the start of what we know will be many waves of grants!
Future Grants
New teams are applying weekly, and should these teams be accepted, then they will appear in the next wave blog post. We predict that we will continue funding grants at least until the end of the year and are looking forward to receiving applications from more teams.
While our grants are targeted towards tighter timescales and smaller scopes, we can easily fund a piece of a larger project. Here are some ideas to get you thinking:
- How can we make deployment of nodes easier?
- How can we help to improve the adoption of decentralized systems within society? For example, do you want to build something that relates to identity, oracles, smart contracts, or asset tokenization?
Please reach out and let us know if you are interested and willing to build on these ideas (grants@web3.foundation).
The application process
We hope that the above list of winners has inspired you to get involved. As a reminder, here is an overview of the application process.
- Read the information at http://grants.web3.foundation
- Open the Google Form and fill in the relevant information (all teams are required to enter information here).
- Make a pull request to the repo (if you are submitting a public application).
- The grants editor reviews all applications to ensure that the necessary level of information was included. Changes may be requested.
- After a number of grant applications have been made, the grants committee will review the latest batch of applications and decide whether to provide funding or not.
Important grant application aspects
Just before you rush ahead and make an application, let us provide a few pointers on what grants are for. The following criteria apply to all applications. Grant funding may not be correct for all teams, but it should be a good choice for a number of early stage projects.
- Application should fit with our areas of interest.
- Code must have an open source license.
- Maximum funding available is $100k.
- Grants are not investments, but they are a source of non-dilutive funding.
- Our budget is limited so grants can not sustain a business in the long run.
- Time horizon is ideally 3 months or less.
- The most important part of the application is the roadmap. Please make this detailed and show the cost of each individual milestone within the roadmap.
- It is understood that developer costs vary worldwide; however, we expect the cost calculations in the roadmap to be reasonable and commensurate for your place of operations.
Get in touch
Should you have any questions about the grants process then feel free to reach out: grants@web3.foundation
We also have Riot channels for real-time discussions on Web3 and Polkadot:
