Hey 0x Community! The 0x team publicly released the 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program (EAP) in December 2018. As part of the release, we received a lot of good questions in our Discord that we’ll cover in this post.



What’s the history of the Ecosystem Acceleration Program?

The 0x team knew early on that encouraging development in the 0x ecosystem was going to be important. It’s hard to start building on top of new technology for multiple reasons (technical, financial, etc), so the team offered technical and financial help from the very beginning with the idea that attracting and supporting quality teams has incredible network effects. The team was convinced that if multiple great teams started building in the 0x ecosystem, they would not only create value themselves, but also help each other build a strong ecosystem.



As part of offering financial help, when the 0x team met great developers in 2017 and 2018 who were building businesses on 0x and needed financial support to build & grow, the team asked them to apply for funding. The applying teams went through a robust application and technical review process where they shared details of their business, as well as some of their code to prove their technical prowess. The 0x team responded by funding the strongest teams, lots of whom are still building valuable businesses on top of 0x today.



The grants program started in August 2017 when the core team was still very small. The team instinctually knew that grants were a good idea, but didn’t have the time or resources to handle lots of applications from the public at the time. As the program grew internally and proved itself, the team realized that opening the application process to the public was a great next step.



What has changed for the program over time?

The team has learned a lot from running a grant program over the past year and a half. We learned quite a few small things along the way, like how to create a better application & technical review process. But the biggest thing we’ve learned is that the 0x ecosystem’s needs change over time. Since early on, it has made sense for the 0x team to help quality developers bootstrap from a bit of code to a growing business. More recently, we’ve been thinking about how we can go beyond this. By taking a long look at our ecosystem, we realized that the public EAP would need to support more than just new businesses. The new program’s three key areas of focus are:

Helping early-stage teams get their project off the ground

Investing in tooling and programs to support all businesses building in the 0x ecosystem

Promoting technological breakthroughs through targeted research grants

How many people applied to the program? How many received funding?

In 2017 and 2018, the 0x team hand-picked external development teams and invited them to apply for funding. We invited teams that we felt were building interesting and useful businesses that contributed to the broader 0x ecosystem. These teams needed capital to accelerate their growth. Because of that hand-picking, the percentage of teams that received funding after going through the application process was high at about 70%. In total, 0x received 42 applications, and funded 29 of them. While our approach of hand-picking applicants made sense in the past, we’re excited to open our application process to the public in order to attract a larger pool of applicants with a more diverse range of ideas.

How has 0x chosen which teams to fund?

We’ve been excited to be more transparent about the EAP, as we think it will be informative for the community and help the projects we fund. We’ve had many learnings in 2017 and 2018. One of the biggest things we’ve wrestled with is the fact that not all the teams we fund will ultimately create something valuable for the ecosystem. It’s a well-known VC dilemma that only a small percentage of businesses are ultimately successful. In order to find great teams, we have a robust application and technical review process, but we realize that we can’t know everything, and we will make mistakes. Our goal is to give out grants to the most promising teams that will most effectively grow the entire 0x ecosystem.



In order to choose which teams to fund, we have been evaluating applications using 3 main criteria:

Does the team have the technical & business skills to bring this idea to market?

Is the team’s business idea realistic, ambitious, and scalable?

How much will this idea benefit the overall 0x ecosystem?

Each of these questions necessarily breaks down into a lot of smaller questions, which is why it has been important for us to build a robust application and technical review process that allows us to collect enough information from teams to make informed choices. We’re constantly iterating to create a better process, and we will be paying attention to which of our EAP grants create meaningful effects for the 0x ecosystem.



What teams received grant funding before the program went public?

The 0x ecosystem has attracted amazing entrepreneurs & developers who are building a wide range of businesses. We’re proud to say that we’ve supported 24 of these teams with over $1 million in grants committed since August 2017! Here are some of the types of businesses that we’ve supported:

ERC20 Relayers

Mobile-Focused ERC20 Relayers

ERC721 Relayers

Prediction Market Relayers

OTC Relayers

ERC20 Relayer as a Service

ERC721 Relayer as a Service

Market-Making Software

0x Trade Explorers

Moving Forward

We’re excited to be more transparent about the Ecosystem Acceleration Program moving forward. We’re planning to share new EAP grantees every two weeks in the Relayer Report. On top of that, we’ll share high-level statistics about the program every 6 months, including how many total applications we receive, how many receive funding, and a quick look back at an aggregated list of all the grantees.



Final Note

This blog post was written to answer FAQs from the 0x community in our Discord channels. If you have any other questions, head over to our Discord server here. And if you know anyone who should apply to the 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program, direct them right here to learn more.