The long-term initiative will take the Waves Grants program to a new level, providing financial, technical and marketing support to developers, with a special focus on dApps written in the RIDE language.

Inspired by the success of Waves Grants, which has proven a major boost to the Waves ecosystem, we are scaling up the program and launching Waves Incubator: a strategic global initiative designed to support the development of Waves-based solutions.

Waves Grants was launched in January with the goal of supporting talented developers and promising startups building the decentralised technologies that are expected to form the backbone for Web 3.0.

In just over three months of operation, the grant program has attracted immense interest and the first recipients have demonstrated excellent results. So far, a total of 50,000 WAVES has been provided in grants to developers.

Grant recipients have been closely involved in the functioning of the Waves ecosystem and have willingly shared their solutions with the entire community, as well as providing valuable feedback and suggesting new and highly ambitious ideas.

Seeing substantial engagement on the part of the developer community and a growing number of promising teams, we decided it was time to scale up — turning the grant program into an incubator for the most promising and innovative projects developed using RIDE for dApps.

While we still welcome projects in various fields, the incubator’s main focus will be on decentralised applications, since we believe this is one of the most promising areas for blockchain technology.

In March, Waves released RIDE for dApps, a version of the RIDE programming language specifically designed for developing decentralised applications.

Although RIDE for dApps is still in TestNet, we have seen significant interest in the language from developers. A large number of complex smart contracts have already been written, and developers have been sharing their solutions with the community. In addition, we have been witnessing overall growth in the dApps segment, with the arrival of numerous scalable solutions that could form the basis of mass adoption.

We’d like to encourage developers to continue working in that direction and we believe that the incubator model — offering comprehensive support as opposed to just funding — will serve that goal in the best possible way.

Projects selected to take part in Waves Incubator will be entitled to:

Up to 100,000 WAVES per project in funding. Technical support provided directly by the Waves team and managed by the Development Relations department. Marketing and PR assistance. We are going to spread the word about your initiative and provide assistance with coverage of your project’s major releases and development.

Based on the company’s goals for the expected number of newly-created dApps and the estimated number of participants, we plan to disburse 1 million WAVES before the end of 2019.

Just like Waves Grants, Waves Incubator is open to developer teams and individual developers alike, and funding could be provided on a long-term basis, covering either various stages of the same project, or different projects from the same developer.

Intellectual rights to solutions developed with support from Waves Incubator will belong to the developers.

The initiative’s ultimate goal is to go beyond the technical side of solutions and help turn them into profitable and self-sustaining businesses, promoting the use of Waves technologies in the real world.

You can apply for support under the Waves Incubator initiative using this form.

More information will be provided soon. Follow our news and updates!