To fund the development of projects and applications that contribute to the Darwinia ecosystem and promote overall network growth, we encourage passionate teams to build innovative cross-chain projects on Darwinia Msgport and Darwinia EVM+.
Anyone is welcome to apply for a grant. Projects funded through our programs are broad in scope, but our focus lies on projects that add value to the ecosystem.
Generally, projects must fulfill the following requirements:
- All code produced as part of a grant must be open-source, and it must not depend on any closed-source software for full functionality.
- We do not award grants for projects that have been the object of a successful token sale.
- As a general rule, teams are asked to finish a grant before applying for another one.
- Lastly, we do not fund projects that actively encourage gambling, illicit trade, money laundering or criminal activities in general.
Additionally, your project will have better chances to be accepted if:
- It presents a well-researched or tested concept, for which, ideally, you are able to show some prior work.
- You can demonstrate that the project will be maintained after completion of the grant, be it through an obvious commitment to the technology from your side, additional funding sources, or an existing business model.
- Your team has proven experience with the relevant languages and technologies and/or a strong technical background. You will be asked to provide the GitHub profiles of your team members as part of your application, which we will examine these for past activity and code quality. Naturally, you can also link to projects on other platforms.
- Your application is rich in technical details and well-defined.
- You can clearly present how your project stands out among competitors or implements technology that doesn't exist in the ecosystem yet.
In particular, we require all projects to create documentation that explains how their project works. At a minimum, written documentation is required for funding. Tutorials or videos are also helpful for new users to understand how to use your product.
Finally, we take licensing and the right of all teams in and outside the ecosystem to be recognized for their work very seriously. Using others' work with no attribution or indication that this was not your own work as part of a milestone delivery will lead to immediate termination. Please reach out to us before submitting if you have any doubts on how to comply with a specific license and we'll be happy to help.
Darwinia Ecosystem Fund is interested in providing grants within the following areas of interest. If any of these topics are of interest to you then please make a speculative application to request funding for your project.
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Cross-chain dApps based on Darwinia Msgport
Cross-chain dApps based on Darwinia Msgport have a wide range of use cases, such as Defi, NFT, DAO, Identity, Metaverse Games, Insurance, and more.
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Development tools and Infrastructures for Darwinia Msgport
Projects that can help others develop Darwinia Msgport-based dApps are very welcome to apply for funding in this category.
Currently, priority will be given to tools such as message explorers, data analysis tools, cross-chain process visualization, data visualization, and health monitoring.
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DApps running Darwinia Chain
EVM+ is a suit of programmable virtual machines that work as the entrypoints to multi layer1 blockchains by Darwinia Msgport. Darwinia Chain is part of EVM+. To make Darwinia Chain more functional, we hope that you can provide various dApps running on Darwinia Chain.
Since Darwinia Chain is part of Darwinia Msgport, we will prioritize dApps requested by the Darwinia Msgport community and these dApps will be listed in "Issues" of this repository.
- Amount: Up to $3,000
- Target: Individuals & Small Teams
- Submission of a detailed project proposal, including expected outcomes and a timeline.
- Demonstrate your coding skills through your historical github repositories.
- Provision of a clear budget plan, explaining how the funds will be effectively utilized.
- Amount: Up to $10,000
- Target: Individuals & Small Teams
- Submission of a detailed project proposal, including detailed milestones.
- Provision of a clear budget plan in the milestones, explaining how the funds will be effectively utilized.
- Demonstration of successful past projects as evidence of execution capability.
- Amount: Up to $30,000
- Target: Small Teams & Start-ups
- Need for a more comprehensive project plan, including market analysis, potential impact, and risk assessment.
- Submission of detailed background information on team members, including relevant experience and skills.
- Presentation of at least one previous successful case related to the proposed project.
- Provide detailed fund use plans and long-term sustainable development strategies.
If your project is complicated and you feel that it is not suitable to use the above levels, you can communicate with our team to determine the grant amount.
The process below is independent of the level. Payment is made in USDT, USDC, DAI, or RING. Grant Program-funded teams are entitled to choose the composition and percentage of different tokens.
- Fork this repository.
- In the newly created fork, create a copy of the technical grant template.
- Label the file as "project_name.md".
- Fill out the template with the details of your project.
- Once you have completed the application, click on "create new pull request".
- Darwinia Ecosytem Fund can (and usually does) issue comments and request changes on the pull request.
- Clarifications and amendments made in the comments need to be included in the application. You may address feedback by directly modifying your application and leaving a comment once you're done. Generally, if you don't reply within 1 month, the application will be closed due to inactivity, but you're always free to reopen it as long as it hasn't been rejected.
- When all requested changes are addressed and the terms and conditions have been signed, someone will mark your application as
ready for reviewand share it internally with the rest of the team. - The application will be accepted and merged as soon as it receives after the majority of the team agrees, or closed after 1 month of inactivity. Unless specified otherwise, the day on which it is accepted will be considered the starting date of the project, and will be used to estimate delivery dates.
- If your application contains multiple milestones, please submit a corresponding pull request as “project_name-milestone_number” after completing each milestone, and the pull request must link to the original application and details of all tasks completed in this milestone. Team can (and usually do) issue comments and request changes on the pull request. Their feedback needs to be resolved before your milestone is accepted.
- Team will merge your pull request to accept the delivery.
- The operations team receives a notification once the delivery is accepted. Payments are usually processed within 14 days.
If your project does not meet the requirements of open-source but does make a positive impact on the development of Darwinia ecosystem. We encourage you to explore the alternative funding options listed below. Please note, however, that you should not seek to fund the same scope of work from multiple sources and that any team found doing so will have its Darwinia Foundation support terminated.
Funds held in Darwinia's on-chain treasury (0x6D6f646c64612f74727372790000000000000000) are accessible for spending proposals. Teams/individuals can request funding from the Darwinia treasury account by submitting either a democracy proposal or a treasury proposal. (Following the removal of the Sudo module during a runtime upgrade on June 13, 2023, the governance of the chain transitioned to the token (RING) holders. Consequently, network control solely resides in the hands of token holders, free from centralized authority.)
The best way to find out about upcoming hackathons is by following Darwinia on various social channels, such as Twitter or Medium.