The goal of Stacks Grants are to fund infrastructure development, community resources, tools, research, and education that serve our mission of a user owned internet, powered by the Stacks Blockchain.
Stacks Foundation Grant Program Beta
We will begin with a beta grants program to build momentum, test our process, and award USD grants up to $5k. The beta program will run through the launch of STX 2.0, at which point we have the opportunity to propose upgrades, including award grants in STXs, a larger review committee, and grants awarded in larger denominations.
- Tools and Services. Are you a web developer interested in building tools that make the protocol easier to interact with? Are you interested in increasing decentralization, data resiliency, and data portability? Can you build tools and services that make it easier for miners, developers, and tokenholders to interact with STX? Examples: a Rosetta API gateway, STX Stacking wallet, STX custody solutions, alternate explorer, custom mining tools / dashboards, chain visualization / analytics, etc.
- Education, Evangelism, and Collaboration. Are you experienced in communication, marketing, community or creative? Create resources that support or grow the community. Examples: videos, documentation, tutorials, workshops, working groups, etc.
- Core Protocol Development. Are you a blockchain developer or computer science researcher? **** Build core infrastructure that helps progress a user-owned internet. Examples: alternate implementations, contributions to stacks-blockchain reference implementation, etc.
- Wish list or Wildcard. Ready to contribute but not sure were to start? We're crowdsourcing ideas from across our ecosystem that best serve our mission. Check out our wish list for ideas or create your own proposal for a project you believe will add value to the ecosystem and explain why.
Grants Proposals are created by and for the community, so the evaluation is purposefully open for feedback from the STX ecosystem. Sharing your ideas with peers is a great way to get input, feedback, and find collaborators.
Final decisions on funding are provided by the Grants Committee but evaluation on the criteria and the scope of the proposal is open to everyone for comment. Initially, the grants committee is comprised of members of the Stacks Foundation (Brittany, Jude and Ryan) and an independent consultant (Raffi Saphire, former lead of LivePeer Grants Program).
Evaluation Criteria
- Grant applications should clearly outline the project's purpose, who benefits, how the project will serve the mission, a measurable outcome, relevant experience from the individual/team, risks, and links to community input, research, or supporting work relevant to your project.
- Community feedback is strongly encouraged. Applicants may benefit by presenting their idea in a blog post, video demo, or forum discussion to get more input on their proposal from the community. It can also kickstart the path to sharing proposal progress and final deliverables with the community over time.
- Contributions must be open source or use a permissive license (where required).
- Must be able to be completed within 4-8 weeks, and at or under $5,000 from a time commitment perspective. This will expand as we shift from beta to a scaled program.
- Grantees must verify their ID and sign a contract to obtain funding in USD, restrictions may apply to citizens of OFAC countries.
- Grants are generally forward looking. Work created in the past is not eligible for a grant.
Application Workflow
- Submit. Submit a proposal by creating a new issue. Product-based proposals must include specs in the submission.
- Submit a new proposal. If you have an idea of something you're excited about, we want to help you make it happen! Use the Grants Template to create your Proposal as an issue. Click get started. Customize the title and then use the pre-populated questions for your proposal. Answer each question in the space under the sentence. Click submit new issue. If you want to make any changes, in the navigation bar you go to issues --> find your proposal, and click edit in the top right.
- Respond to a wishlist proposal. Check out the wishlist issues, and respond as a comment with your proposal to the one you'd like to work on.
- Feedback. Receive feedback from the Grants Committee within 7 days, if application incomplete or missing information, that is requested. We review updates batched every Tuesday at 2 PM EST, so keep that in mind if you want us to review your updated proposal within a week.
- Community. Your proposal will be open to the community for feedback and comments as well. We encourage you to share your proposal in Discord, Telegram, the Forum, or to other parts of your community to solicit input from your peers.
- Review. Completed applications are reviewed by the Grants Committee during the weekly review on Tuesdays. Committee assesses if the application is : accepted, passed, or needs more information. Feedback, comments, and status updates are provided publicly in Github comments.
- Contract. Completed applications require a contract to finalize funding, it will include details on funding, delivery date, and impact if funding is not delivered.
- Deliver. Submit deliverables by the agreed upon time in within the Github thread, and tag the committee. If the grant is broken into milestones, we'll continue to update on this thread.
- Celebrate! Share your wins and your progress with the community. It's a great way to grow support of your work over time. We're all rooting for you!
- Discuss your grant proposal with peers through the #grants Discord channel
- Share your proposal through Telegram or the Forum
- Grants Program Beta Foundation blog post
- Blank Grant Application Template