To encourage creativity and development in the Stellar ecosystem, we’re announcing the Stellar Build Challenge.

Stellar.org will grant awards in the following four categories: Anchors, Applications, Exchanges, and First-Time Submissions. We’ll announce the first round of winners on October 1, 2016.

Build Challenge awards will be funded by unclaimed lumens from the bitcoin-lumen program. This pilot challenge is simple by design: it’s an experiment to find ways to develop services that are fair, affordable, and community-driven, and at the same time drive uptake of the Stellar network to maximize efficiency and reach. We plan to learn from it and offer similar programs in the future.

Categories and Awards

We’re starting with the following four categories for awards.

Anchors: 4 Annual Awards, Based on Usage

Anchors are either banks, licensed money-service providers, or mobile money operators that accept deposits, issue credits, and honor withdrawals on the Stellar network. They are vital to the success of the Stellar network.

Entries will be evaluated based on usage and uptake.

1st: 55 million lumens

2nd: 44 million lumens

3rd: 33 million lumens

4th: 22 million lumens

To qualify as an anchor, organizations that enter the challenge must meet the following criteria:

Record customer balances of some asset in the Stellar ledger

Support federation for deposits and withdrawals

Have a proper stellar.toml so others can add your anchor by domain name

Comply with local regulations

Sustain activity and placement for 12 months

These awards will be determined on October 1, 2016. The lumens will be held in escrow and will only be delivered on July 1, 2017, if the anchors still qualify at that date.

Exchanges: 4 Annual Awards, Based on Volume

Four awards will recognize exchanges that support lumen trading.

Entries will be evaluated by the lumen volume on the qualifying exchange.

1st: 33 million lumens

2nd: 22 million lumens

3rd: 14 million lumens

4th: 5 million lumens

To qualify as an exchange, organizations that enter the challenge must meet the following criteria:

Trade lumens for fiat or digital currency

Accept lumen deposits and honor withdrawals

Deposit lumens via federation

Support federation for withdrawals

Allow fiat deposits/withdrawals via Stellar

Be listed on coinmarketcap.com

Comply with local regulations

Sustain activity and placement for 12 months

As in the anchor category, these awards will be decided on October 1, 2016. The lumens will be held in escrow and will only be delivered on July 1, 2017, if the exchanges still qualify at that date.

Applications: Quarterly Awards, Judged by Panel

All kinds of apps are possible with the Stellar network. We have broken this down into a few subcategories. Due to the qualitative nature of this category, award recipients will be determined by a panel of community members (more information below).

Wallets

1st: 8 million lumens

2nd: 5.5 million lumens

To qualify as a wallet, entries must meet the following criteria:

Be available on the web or downloadable for iOS or Android

Send lumens to federated addresses

Have the capability to add anchors by domain name

Support balances in multiple currencies

Most active forum dedicated to Stellar: 5.5 million lumens Trading client: 11 million lumens Most innovative applications

1st: 11 million lumens

2nd: 5.5 million lumens

3rd: 2.7 million lumens

Participants may resubmit each quarter, and may win multiple times.

First-Time Submissions: Quarterly Awards

To encourage developers new to the Stellar ecosystem to build, each first-time submission from a unique GitHub account will be awarded 200K lumens.

To qualify as a first-time submission, entries must meet the following criteria:

Represent original work from the developer, open-sourced on GitHub

Be functional and able to demo

Participants may only receive the first-time submission award once (hence the name).

Timeline and Judging

Participants can submit their projects for consideration in mid-September. An entry form will be available then. The first round of awards will be granted on October 1, 2016.

Awards will be decided by a panel of judges from the Stellar community. This panel includes the following community members. Also listed are their handles on Stellar’s public slack channel.

Cheng Kuan @lab

Johan Stén @dzham

Eno Han @eno

Christian Rudder

Tim Akinbo @takinbo

Judges will have one vote for each potential award in the four categories. Judges will not cast votes in categories for which they have submitted entries.

The Fine Print

If you live in a restricted area—any country on the U.S. sanctions list, as well as the states of NY, CT, or NH—regulations prevent us from sending you lumens. Unfortunately, therefore, residents of restricted areas are not eligible for an award.

All participants will retain the intellectual property associated with their submission.

Next Steps

Time to build! Start prototyping your idea for an entry. Stay tuned for updates on the submission process.

For questions or support, please reach out via slack.stellar.org or [email protected].

