General Grants Program

📢 The Web3 Foundation General Grants Program focuses on technology grants which teams wish to keep private, need to be paid out in fiat or are larger than $30,000.

We ask teams to first consider applying via the ➡️ Open Grants Program, which has faster processing times and provides grants of up to $30,000 for initial applications and $100,000 for follow-up ones. Please consider applying via Open Grants no matter the scope of your project.

👋 Introduction
📝 Process
📬 Request for Proposals (RFP) Suggestions
💡 Help
- Additional information
- Real-time conversation
🚀 Alternative Funding Sources

👋 Introduction

As part of our commitment to promoting the Web3 ecosystem, we offer comprehensive grants programs focused on funding software development and research efforts related to Polkadot, Kusama and Substrate. For more information about the Web3 Foundation, please visit the About page on our website.

Only apply via the General Grants Program if:

you seek funding of $30,000+ and your work cannot be split into smaller milestones,
you want your team/project information to remain private, or
you can only accept fiat payments.

The maximum amount of funding per application is limited to US $100,000. Projects requesting $30,000 or less are likely to receive faster approval, whereas larger projects necessitate closer evaluation and may face longer waiting times as a consequence.

Teams can apply for grants more than once, but they need to successfully complete the previous project before receiving additional funds. Furthermore, teams shouldn’t seek to cover 100% of their early-stage funding via W3F Grants alone.

Guidelines

Anyone is welcome to apply for a grant. Projects funded through our programs are broad in scope, but our focus lies on strong technical projects that add value to the ecosystem.

Generally, your project will have better chances to get accepted if:

It presents a well-researched or tested concept, for which ideally you are able to show some prior work.
You can demonstrate that the project will be maintained after completion of the grant, be it through an obvious commitment to the technology from your side, additional funding sources or an existing business model.
Your team has proven experience with the relevant languages and technologies and/or a strong technical background. We ask you to provide the GitHub profiles of all team members as part of your application and will examine these for past activity and code quality. Naturally, you can also link to projects on other platforms.
Your application is rich in technical details and well-defined.
You can clearly present how your project stands out among competitors or implements technology that doesn't exist in the ecosystem yet.

Additionally, it must fulfill the following requirements:

All code produced as part of a grant must be open-sourced, and it must also not rely on closed-source software for full functionality. We prefer Apache 2.0, but GPLv3, MIT or Unlicense are also acceptable.
We do not award grants for projects that have been the object of a successful token sale.
Lastly, we do not fund projects that actively encourage gambling, illicit trade, money laundering or criminal activities in general.

In addition to the information provided on your application, note that your project will need to comply with our Guidelines for Milestone Deliverables. In particular, we require all projects to create documentation that explains how their project works. At a minimum, written documentation is required for funding. Tutorials or videos are also helpful for new users to understand how to use your product. If your team's background is purely technical, consider hiring a freelance or part-time technical writer as part of the grant.

We also have Announcement Guidelines for grant-related communications.

Finally, we take licensing and the right of all teams in and outside the ecosystem to be recognised for their work very seriously. Using others' work with no attribution or indication that this was not your own work as part of a milestone delivery will lead to immediate termination. Please reach out to us before submitting if you have any doubts on how to comply with a specific license and we'll be happy to help.

Project ideas

An overview of existing projects in the Web 3.0 Technology Stack along with broad project ideas we would potentially be interested in funding can be found here, as well as a list of previously accepted applications here. Additionally, the Substrate Builders feedback board may contain some useful ideas for grant projects.

Requests For Proposals (RFPs) represent concrete ideas for projects that we would like to see implemented. Several teams may apply for the same RFP, so even if another team has already applied to implement a certain RFP, we invite you to do the same if you're interested.

Finally, you don't need to start your own project in order to be eligible for a grant. Instead, some teams choose to port existing work to Substrate, where the pertinent licenses allow, or to contribute to an existing open-source project. In the latter case, you should check in advance that the maintainers of the project are interested in your contribution, and the acceptance of the milestones will generally be tied to the inclusion of your work in said project.

If you have a good concept of the technical challenges that your idea entails and would like feedback before applying, you can send us an email and tell us about it.

Support

The scope of our Grants Programs consists of funding and feedback on delivered milestones. This means that we do not provide hands-on support as part of a grant, but if you face specific issues during development, we will do our best and try to direct you to the correct resources. If this sounds like something you would like however, you may also want to apply to Parity's Substrate Builders Program, which provides hands-on technical, ecosystem and strategical long-term support and access to extensive resources. You can find general documentation and more information on Substrate on the Substrate Developer Hub, and we encourage you to join the community in order to get help with specific issues or to stay up to date with the most recent developments.

For questions about the grants program itself, see our FAQ.

📝 Process

Application

We strongly recommend working off of the grant application template, which gives an indication of what a good roadmap should look like and outlines the criteria and information we look for in an application.

Partially public applications that limit financial information (i.e. the requested funding amount) to the application form in step ii. are preferred. However, teams are free to make fully public applications as well as fully private applications.
1. Fully or partially public applications should be initiated with a pull request to this repository by following the steps below. Teams who intend to make a fully private application can skip this step.
  1. Fork this repository.
  2. In the newly created fork, create a copy of the application template (grants/grant_application_template.md). If you're using the GitHub web interface, you will need to create a new file and copy the contents of the template inside the new one. Make sure you do not modify the template file directly. Name the new file after your project: project_name.md.
    - In the few cases where your application is in response to a specific RFP, you should create the file inside the rfp-responses folder.
    - All other applications go into the speculative folder.
  3. Fill out the template with the details of your project. The more information you provide, the faster the review. To get an idea of what a strong application looks like, you can have a look at the following examples: 1, 2, 3, 4. Naturally, if you're only applying for a smaller grant that only consists of, say, UI work, you don't need to provide as much detail.
  4. Once you're done, create a pull request. The pull request should only contain one new file—the Markdown file you created from the template.
  5. You will see a comment template that requests an abstract of the project and provides a checklist. Please complete these as appropriate. You can tick the items in the checklist once the PR has been created.
2. Fill out the General Grants application form ➡️ here.
Application Review
- The Web3 Foundation will review the application, determine if more information is required and potentially schedule a call with the team.
- Parity Technologies may assist in the review of some applications.
Decision
- Applicants will be notified via email of whether their proposal has been accepted or not.
- If a proposal is successful, further communication will be required to determine specific details around timelines and payment schedules.
Follow-up
- Once work on the project has started, the Web3 Foundation will want to have follow-up conversations to see how the project is progressing.
- To help speed up the milestone evaluation process, take a look at the Guidelines for Milestone Deliverables. Milestones will be evaluated based on this document and the details provided in your application.

📬 Request for Proposals (RFP) Suggestions

If you think that we should support the development of certain tools or projects (related to Polkadot, Kusama or Substrate) that aren't in the Polkadot/Kusama tech stack, feel free to submit an RFP suggestion using the process described below. We are particularly interested in supporting projects that could be leveraged by other builders in our ecosystem. We will review your proposal and, if we believe it’s useful, will create an RFP based on your idea and try to find teams to work on it.

Instructions for submitting an RFP suggestion:

Fork this repository.
In the newly created fork, create a copy of the suggestion template (rfps/suggestion-template.md) inside the rfps folder. Make sure you create a new file and copy the contents of the template inside the new one, and do not modify the template file directly.
Name the file after your idea: project_name.md.
Fill out the template with the project details. Please include as many details as possible.
Once you're done, click on "Create new pull request". The pull request should only contain one new file—the Markdown file you created from the template.
You will see the same template as for creating an application. Plase replace it with this one.

If you have an idea for a project but lack the technical background to create a detailed outline, you can open an issue instead or add it to the tech stack as a potentially interesting project. However, your idea will have better chances of being implemented if you can provide a project outline such that it can be picked up straight away by a capable team.

💡 Help

Additional information


W3F Website	W3F Twitter	W3F Medium	Polkadot Wiki	Web 3.0 Reddit	W3F YouTube

Real-time conversation

We have Element channels for real-time discussions on Web3 and Polkadot. Join the conversation.

🚀 Alternative Funding Sources

Some funding sources might be more and some less suitable for your project throughout its various stages. We encourage you to explore alternative funding options listed below. Please note, however, that you should not seek to fund the same scope of work from multiple sources and that any team found doing so will have its Web3 Foundation support terminated.

Treasury

The treasury is a pot of on-chain funds collected through transaction fees, slashing, staking inefficiencies, etc. The funds held in the treasury can be spent on spending proposals. Both Polkadot and Kusama offer everyone the opportunity to apply for funding via the treasury. See:

Open Grants Program

Our Open Grants Program is suited for technology grants of up to $30,000, which are tracked transparently on GitHub and disbursed in BTC, USDT or DAI.

Hackathons

From time to time, Web3 Foundation and/or Parity organise hackathons to promote quick prototyping of Polkadot related ideas. We highly encourage you to participate in these hackathons. Bear in mind, however, that you cannot submit the same work for a hackathon and the Grants Program. If you have worked on a project for a hackathon, your grant application should either propose a new set of features or otherwise build on top of your previous work. The same applies in reverse, although that will likely be less common.

Other Grant Programs

Below is a list of other grant programs in the Polkadot/Substrate ecosystem:

vgantchev/General-Grants-Program