This document will be part of the terms and conditions of your agreement and therefore needs to contain all the required information about the project. Don't remove any of the mandatory parts presented in bold letters or as headlines (except for the title)! Lines starting with a
>(such as this one) should be removed. Please use markdown instead of HTML (e.g.instead of<img>).See the Grants Program Process on how to submit a proposal.
- Team Name: Legal name of your team (e.g. Duo)
- Payment Address: In the case of fiat payment, please share your bank account privately with [email protected] via your contact email (see below) and enter the date when you shared the information with us (e.g. Fiat 24.12.1971, 11:59) here. Otherwise, provide the BTC, Ethereum (USDC/DAI) or Polkadot/Kusama (USDT) payment address. Please also specify the currency. (e.g. 0x8920... (DAI))
- Level: 1, 2 or 3
❗ The combination of your GitHub account submitting the application and the payment address above will be your unique identifier during the program. Please keep them safe.
If this application is in response to an RFP, please indicate this on the first line of this section.
If this is an application for a follow-up grant (the continuation of an earlier, successful W3F grant), please provide the name and/or pull request of the said grant on the first line of this section.
Please provide the following:
- If the name of your project is not descriptive, a tag line (one sentence summary).
- A brief description of your project.
- An indication of how your project relates to / integrates into Substrate / Polkadot / Kusama.
- An indication of why your team is interested in creating this project.
- An indication if your project is academic research, i.e., intended to be published in an academic peer-reviewed venue, or a technical one, to be published as a technical report on the internet.
We expect the teams to already have a solid idea about your project's expected final state. Therefore, we ask the teams to submit (where relevant):
- The problem(s) that you want to investigate, and why these are important.
- Research questions/hypothesis.
- The methodology that will be applied.
- The data collection and analysis procedures.
- The expected results and how they would be double-checked by the grants team (reproducibility of the data analysis).
- Relevant related work.
- Intended venue for results publication and the timeline for publication.
- What your project is not or will not provide or implement
- This is a place for you to manage expectations and clarify any limitations that might not be obvious
Things that shouldn’t be part of the application (see also our FAQ):
- The (future) tokenomics of your project
- Business-oriented activities (marketing, business planning), events or outreach
Help us locate your project in the Polkadot/Substrate/Kusama landscape and what problems it tries to solve by answering each of these questions:
- Where and how does your project fit into the ecosystem?
- Who is your target audience (parachain/dapp/wallet/UI developers, designers, your own user base, some dapp's userbase, yourself)?
- What need(s) does your project meet?
- Are there any other projects similar to yours in the Substrate / Polkadot / Kusama ecosystem?
- If so, how is your project different?
- If not, are there similar projects in related ecosystems?
- Name of team leader
- Names of team members
- Contact Name: Full name of the contact person in your team
- Contact Email: Contact email (e.g. [email protected])
- Website: Your website
- Registered Address: Address of your registered legal entity, if available. Please keep it in a single line. (e.g. High Street 1, London LK1 234, UK)
- Registered Legal Entity: Name of your registered legal entity, if available. (e.g. Duo Ltd.)
Please describe the team's relevant experience. For research-related grants, references to past publications and projects in a related domain are helpful.
If anyone on your team has applied for a grant at the Web3 Foundation previously, please list the name of the project and legal entity here.
- https://github.com/<your_organisation>/<project_1>
- https://github.com/<your_organisation>/<project_2>
Please also provide the GitHub accounts of all team members. If they contain no activity, references to projects hosted elsewhere or live are also fine.
- https://github.com/<team_member_1>
- https://github.com/<team_member_2>
- https://www.linkedin.com/<person_1>
- https://www.linkedin.com/<person_2>
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=<person_1>
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=<person_2>
If you've already started working on your project or it is part of a larger project, please provide a link and a description of the research here. In any case, please provide some documentation on the research and other work you have conducted before applying. This could be:
- links to improvement proposals or RFPs (requests for proposal),
- academic publications relevant to the problem,
- links to your research diary, blog posts, articles, forum discussions or open GitHub issues,
- references to conversations you might have had related to this project with anyone from the Web3 Foundation.
This section should break the research development roadmap down into milestones and deliverables. To assist you in defining it, we have created a document with examples for some grant categories, including research here. Since these will be part of the agreement, it helps to describe the deliverable we should expect in as much detail as possible, plus how we can verify that deliverable. Whenever milestones are delivered, we refer to this document to ensure that everything has been delivered as expected.
Below we provide an example roadmap. In the descriptions, it should be clear how your project is related to Substrate, Kusama or Polkadot. We recommend that teams structure their roadmap as 1 milestone ≈ 1 month.
❗ If any of your deliverables is based on somebody else's work, make sure you cite it. If your research contains software artifacts in the same situation, make sure you work and publish under the terms of the license of the respective project and that you highlight this fact in your milestone documentation and in the source code if applicable! Teams that submit others' work without attributing it will be immediately terminated.
- Total Estimated Duration: Duration of the whole project (e.g. 2 months)
- Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): Average number of full-time employees working on the project throughout its duration (see Wikipedia, e.g. 2 FTE)
- Total Costs: Requested amount in USD for the whole project (e.g. 12,000 USD). Note that the acceptance criteria and additional benefits vary depending on the level of funding requested. This and the costs for each milestone need to be provided in USD; if the grant is paid out in Bitcoin, the amount will be calculated according to the exchange rate at the time of payment.
- Estimated duration: 1 month
- FTE: 1,5
- Costs: 8,000 USD
❗ The default deliverables 0a-0e below are mandatory for all milestones.
| Number | Deliverable | Specification |
|---|---|---|
| 0a. | Copyright and Licenses | CC0 / CC BY 4.0 / Apache 2.0 / GPLv3 / MIT / Unlicense |
| 0b. | Documentation/Tutorial | We will provide both artifacts documentation of the deliverables and a basic tutorial that explains how a user can (for example) execute the code included or can visualize data or use any artifacts included. |
| 0c. | Methodology | Detailed explanation of how the results were achieved and how to reproduce/verify the results. |
| 0d. | Infrastructure | We will provide the list of all infrastructure requirements (text editors with proper versions, software packages, data packages, etc) that can be used to verify the deliveries with this milestone. Ideally, we recommend the usage of LaTeX/Overleaf for article production and Docker files for software execution. |
| 0e. | Article | We will send an article or part of it (with source code) that explains in the English language [...] (what was done/achieved as part of the grant). (Content, language and medium should reflect your target audience described above.). For level 2 and 3 grants, the article must contain the following statement in an acknowledgments section: This work was supported by a research grant from the Web3 Foundation. |
| 1. | List of academic papers regarding X | We will systematically search the literature about X and deliver a list of papers to read with web links to them |
| 2. | Data to be extracted from the papers | Data fields with the explanation of each that will be extracted from the papers ... |
| 3. | Analysis procedures | We gonna describe all the procedures planned for the analysis that will be conducted in the next milestone ... |
- Estimated Duration: 1 month
- FTE: 1,5
- Costs: 8,000 USD
...
Please include here
- how you intend to use, enhance, promote and support your project in the short term, and
- the team's long-term plans and intentions in relation to it.
You can find more information about the program here.
- Referrer: Name of the Polkadot Ambassador or GitHub account of the Web3 Foundation grantee
- Payment Address: BTC, Ethereum (USDC/DAI) or Polkadot/Kusama (USDT) payment address. Please also specify the currency. (e.g. 0x8920... (DAI))
How did you hear about the Grants Program? Web3 Foundation Website / Medium / Twitter / Element / Announcement by another team / personal recommendation / etc.
Here you can also add any additional information that you think is relevant to this application but isn't part of it already, such as:
- Work you have already done.
- If there are any other teams who have already contributed (financially) to the project.
- Previous grants you may have applied for.