Web3 Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of grants.web3.foundation. Grants continue to play a large part in our commitment to building the Web 3.0 ecosystem. This blog details our areas of interest and the steps required to apply for funding.

If you’re applying for a technical development grant apply here and for community grants apply here.

All documents required to apply for funding sit within the collaboration repo (collab.web3.foundation): a public repository to help coordinate our collaboration efforts with teams working in the Web 3.0 ecosystem. This repo enables teams in the Web 3.0 community to find potential projects and collaborators, and now a full fledged process for funding your project.

In addition to the available grants listed, we consider applications for cool ideas that we haven’t yet thought of, so please feel free to submit your idea for grant funding! However in the near term, we are most interested in teams building with Substrate or Polkadot.

Grant Opportunities

Grants come in two groups: Targeted and Speculative.

Targeted grants will be issued by RFPs and are specific to an area of highest interest to the foundation. An example is the the PRE grant.

Speculative grants are for teams that want to apply for funding but haven’t found an RFP that’s specific to their interests.

Areas of Interest

The areas of interest for our grants program are available in the grants document of the repo, but the following is a quick overview of our interests within software development:

New chains and runtime modules

Second layer protocols

Monitoring (e.g. explorers)

Tooling (e.g. UI, deployment)

Hardware wallet / HSM integration

Parachain development kit

Protocol integrations

Testing tools (e.g benchmarking, security)

The first technical grant available was the Polkadot Runtime Environment (PRE) grant. Web3 Foundation is funding the development of an alternative implementation of PRE, which is a core component of Polkadot. Applications for this grant have come to a soft close with successful teams now engaged in next steps.

How to apply for a grant

At this point I’m sure you’re thinking “show me the money!”. Before we get to that point we would like to explain the process first.

Read the information at http://grants.web3.foundation

Open the Google Form and fill in the relevant information.

Note: all teams are required to enter information here.

teams are required to enter information here. Please ensure application is specific to Substrate / Polkadot.

Please keep duration to a maximum of 6 months.

If filling out a private application, please provide a detailed roadmap in this form.

For a public application, you will also need to fill out the necessary sections of the Google Form.

Please also make a pull request into the speculative folder.

Pull requests require forking the repo and filling out the application template.

Please ensure the roadmap is detailed and contains estimates of cost.

The more you read from the grants page, the better you will understand what we are looking for and what you should to do. While we are open to many ideas for funding, we do have a long list of areas of interest. We will give priority to teams who apply to an area of interest. Moreover, we must reiterate that we are primarily looking to fund teams who are building on Polkadot or Substrate at the moment.

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