introduce
The US$200 million developer Grants program provided by the DFINITY Foundation aims to promote the development of the Internet computing ecosystem, reduce developers' development costs, and incubate decentralized applications by providing support to potential developers and teams. , and attract more developers from all over the world to participate in the co-construction of the ecosystem.
Total funds available: $200,000,000
INFO - Fill out the Dev Grant application form on the DFINITY Foundation official website:
dfinity.submittable.com/submit
expect
DFINITY hopes that developers in the ICP ecosystem can promote the development of the ecosystem in the following aspects through creative decentralized Web3 applications:
1. Burn more Cycles
Cycles is the stable currency of the ICP ecosystem. It is used to measure the computing resources consumed by container smart contracts. Cycles are required to deploy and run ICP's unique container smart contracts. Developers can purchase Cycles on the DEX platform in the ecosystem, or obtain ICP. Convert ICP to Cycles. During this process, ICP is destroyed, and the overall circulating supply of ICP is reduced, resulting in deflation (see "Total ICP Burned" in the lower right corner of the web page).
TIP: For any ICP application, the greatest value it can bring to the entire ecosystem is to burn as many Cycles as possible.
For the ICP economy, the more valuable a DApp is => the more users it brings => user visits bring more Update Calls and data that needs to be stored => more Update Calls and data that needs to be stored will consume more Cycles => Because the consumption of cycles ultimately comes from the destruction of ICP, the total amount of ICP is reduced.
For developers, only when DApp can generate enough value and find its own product-market fit => can it generate a sustainable revenue model => can it be able to pay the corresponding product operating costs, including the Cycles consumed by smart contracts.
Therefore, the consumption of Cycles, or "ICP burning", is the only criterion to test whether a DApp or even the entire ICP technology ecosystem can create value for society.
2. Bring more Internet identity users
Internet Identity is ICP's very unique identity authentication technology, which helps ICP DApp solve user identity authentication and login. It is similar to Metamask's significance to Ethereum smart contracts, but its security is far better than that of the traditional center-based blockchain industry. Based on the browser plug-in wallet, users can use an Internet identity to log in to all ICP applications.
To measure whether a DApp is valuable, in addition to traditional daily active users (DAU), it is the growth of overall users, that is, the number of newly created Internet identities.
3. Bring more container smart contracts
An ICP DApp that can attract many users will usually bring a large number of new containers, especially when the DApp is designed to generate its own directly controlled containers for each user, such as OpenChat and Mora, the greater the number of containers, usually It will also bring more consumption of Cycles and mean more Internet identity users.
4. Bring more on-chain assets TVL (Total Value Locked)
For DeFi applications, it is crucial to be able to bring more on-chain assets to a public chain. ICP’s DeFi ecosystem has just started, and there is a lot of room for future development.
5. Empower other developers in the community
Many of ICP's underlying protocols have been open sourced. The ICP technology ecosystem is still in its early development stage. Community developers and the DFINITY Foundation need to work together to create more developer tools to lower the threshold for more developers to enter ICP. The Foundation Teams that receive Dev Grant are encouraged to open source code as much as possible, especially tool products.
TIP: The greater your contribution in the above five aspects, the more support you will receive from the DFINITY Foundation.
Funding objects
What kind of projects are easy to get Dev Grant from DFINITY Foundation? ICP's container smart contracts can be used in almost all vertical fields of the Internet, including social networking, games, media, entertainment, finance, enterprise services, cross-chain protocols, etc. The DFINITY Foundation welcomes developers to give full play to their imagination and build The most disruptive decentralized Web3 application.
DANGER: The DFINITY Foundation does not welcome grant-shopping or re-skin teams.
In the blockchain industry, a project party often applies for subsidies from multiple public chain foundations for the same product. Regarding this phenomenon, the DFINITY Foundation neither rejects nor encourages it. Each public chain foundation has its own standards and purposes.
The founder of a project needs to do his best to obtain as many resources as possible to support his team, but we hope that the founder will first focus on whether he can find the product-market fit of the product and find users willing to pay as soon as possible, rather than relying on major companies. The Foundation's grant lives on.
INFO: DFINITY issues ICP to developers through the Dev Grant program to subsidize the cost of developers using and testing container smart contracts. This ICP is neither a sponsorship fee nor an investment amount, and should not be spent on anything unrelated to deploying smart contracts. Other behaviors (such as marketing, personnel recruitment, computer procurement, etc.).
Covered areas
Developer tools: such as IDEs, debuggers, logging libraries, etc.;
Infrastructure: such as oracles, asset bridges, etc.;
Integration and APIs: such as chat, email, maps, etc.;
Container Development Kits (CDKs) and Agents;
DApps and open internet services, such as the projects listed here:
github.com/dfinity/grant-rfps/blob/main/requests-for-startups.md
Recent hot topics
Since the ICP mainnet was launched in May 2021, DFINITY's R&D team has continued to develop along the roadmap and launched several major features. We encourage developers to make more attempts in the following popular areas, Give full play to the powerful technical advantages of ICP:
HTTPs Outcalls
BTC-ICP direct integration
ETH-ICP direct integration
AI
vetKeys
INFO: Use referral code DeAI2023 to apply for Dev Grant related to artificial intelligence.
For more details, please see the official English website of DFINITY Dev Grants.
How to Write a Grant Application
Do preliminary research
Before applying for a Grant, please do your research preparations, including:
Understanding of IC technology
Understand what IC can do and what the technical characteristics of IC are;
Why does your product need to use IC technology, and what specific technologies are needed?
How to develop on IC, learn how to use dfx, how to deploy smart contracts on IC, and more.
Understanding of IC ecology
What projects already exist in the IC ecosystem;
Are there any projects similar to yours? What are the leading projects in the field you are interested in?
If so, what are their advantages and disadvantages.
Conduct feasibility studies
You need to conduct a feasibility study Proof of Concept (POC) for the project. It is best to have a short video or online project to show your research results when applying.
TIP: You can start your pre-research through ic123.xyz.
Select Grant Size
Currently there are three levels of Grant size:
$5,000
$25,000
$100,000
For teams applying for the DFINITY Dev Grant for the first time, it is recommended to start with a smaller ($5,000, $25,000) grant application that includes a clear goal, how to relate to the IC, clear milestone planning, etc. Please do not apply for $100 at the beginning. K's grant - will be rejected directly at the pre-review stage.
After the first grant is successfully completed, you can continue to apply for the next one. The trust between the foundation and community developers needs to be gradually established and consolidated during the process of applying for and completing the grant.
Reasonable planning
For reviewers of dev grant applications, an important goal of the review is to understand your project team and project content, such as: What goal does this project want to accomplish? How does this goal relate to IC? Is the applicant team capable of accomplishing this goal?
Among them, the most important issue is whether the project milestones are clear. We hope that the milestones you write can meet the following requirements:
Avoid abstract milestones, and the attached project should be as specific and acceptable as possible. For example, do not write "implement the dashboard", but specify the specific functions included in the dashboard, including which buttons are included.
Do pre-research and ensure that the feasibility study is completed before submitting the dev grant application. The project milestones should not include "defining the project scope", "technical research", etc.
Provide an architectural overview. The architectural overview of the project (in text, diagrams, etc.) can demonstrate your understanding of IC and the project.
Detailed interface description. If your project provides services, develops libraries, etc., please provide a clear API interface, including parameters and return values. If possible, please use Candid to describe it.
Highlight the use of IC and clearly indicate how parts of the project are related to IC, such as which parts of the project will be deployed on IC, which data will be stored on IC, and which operations will consume Cycles. If you use IC Unique features, such as HTTP outcalls, vetKeys, or Bitcoin integration, also be listed in detail.
Include use cases. A good use case can help reviewers see the product from the user's perspective and understand the value that users can get from the project.
How to acquire users? For a product without users, no matter how advanced the technology, no matter how clever the product design is, it is meaningless. What kind of users will use this product, why it is necessary to use this product, and whether users are willing to pay. The sooner we consider these issues The better.
Impact on the IC ecosystem. Among the above five aspects (cycles, Internet Identity, canister, TVL, open source tools), in which aspect(s) can your product contribute to the IC ecosystem?
If your product has been released on other platforms, what is the number of users and how to prove it? If you mentioned relevant information in your grant application, please also provide some verification methods in your application.
TIP: A properly planned dev grant usually has a development cycle of three to four months.
The DFINITY Foundation will also provide dev grants of up to $100K to a small number of very mature ICP projects. Such projects need to meet three conditions:
Have completed a dev grant, and have the qualifications and experience to successfully complete ICP grant projects and implement products;
The product has accumulated a considerable user base and has traction;
A large amount of Cycles consumption has begun.
Start applying
Please click the Submittable link below to start applying👇:
dfinity.submittable.com/submit
On the application page, select Developer Grant Program and follow the prompts to continue with the next steps. For specific operations, please refer to how to submit a Grant application:
support.dfinity.org/hc/en-us/articles/4401932864020-How-to-Submit-a-Grant-Application
Other things to note
DANGER: Please don’t paste the business plan you showed to investors.
The DFINITY Foundation's standards for evaluating a Dev Grant application are completely different from the way investors invest in start-ups. When judging whether a project should receive a Dev Grant, we only look at the product and technology itself, and only care about how your product uses ICP. Technology.
Other things that everyone likes to see in the financing BP, such as the luxurious advisory team, the strong industry experience of the founding team, the cooperation buffs of major institutional partners, the grand feelings for the future of Web3, and the swaying and colorful business models are all words that must be praised. The blue ocean market worth billions has no reference significance for our judgment.
On the contrary, mentioning these contents in the dev grant application is almost a demerit - because you obviously misunderstood the purpose of the DFINITY Dev Grant. The foundation is not an angel investor, we just hope to promote an open source technology, nothing more.
Special attention should also be paid to the description of the team background. In the application form, just describe the front-end/back-end engineers, UX designers, product managers, etc. who will directly participate in this grant project - in most cases, the team size is 3-10 Within people.
We only care about the technical capabilities and background of developers. The founders of the entire team, whether they are CMO, CFO, CBO, CEO or investors, no matter how brilliant their backgrounds are, if they are not directly involved in the ICP developer grant project team , their professional experience does not need to be written on the grant application form.
You may be neighbors with Xu Xiaoping and Shen Nanpeng. This big trick can be left to future investors, rather than an application form describing how developers write container smart contracts.
TIP: The most important principle is to be realistic. The more realistic, the better. Avoid rhetoric and generalities.
In addition, independent developers can also apply for dev grant. There are many examples of this. It is entirely possible for a 10x engineer to create an amazing ICP hit DApp within a few months. Of course, independent engineers will promote products and The challenges will be greater when running a community, and I hope that when you reach that stage, your team can continue to thrive.
For more questions, please refer to - Developer Grant FAQs (English):
support.dfinity.org/hc/en-us/sections/8730977702804-Grants
interview
After submitting the application
After submitting the application in Submittable, DFINITY's DevRel engineers will do a written review based on the materials. If multiple votes are passed, the project team will receive an email inviting an interview. If multiple votes are not passed, the project team will be notified by email that the application was not passed. .
If you have not received any news after submitting for more than a week, you can contact the DFINITY Asia Pacific team (TG @yangherbert) or leave a message in the ICP China Twitter community and tell us the name of your project, and we will check the progress for you.
Due to the cultural differences and language barriers between East and West, the dev grant applications (in English) submitted by many Chinese teams are far from reflecting the true strength of the team.
TIP: It is recommended that the team contact the DFINITY Asia Pacific team before submitting the application to discuss how to plan the dev grant application instead of waiting until after the application.
prepare for interview
The interview invitation email from a DFINITY team member looks like this:
TIP：选择 Calendar#3openings in Chinese language（Asia Timezone）。
In this case, the DFINITY Asia Pacific team conducts interviews in Chinese (if you want to use English, of course) in the UTC+8 time zone.
Here are two pieces of advice for your first interview with the DFINITY team:
Bring the technical person in charge of the team. 95% of our focus is on technology. If you can't explain the technical details, you can ask the developer or technical person in charge to explain it. This way the communication efficiency will be much higher. We don't care about your title. In terms of rank in the team and previous background, we only care about how well you understand ICP technology and whether you can build a DApp.
Turn on the camera, we hope to have a deeper understanding of you on the Zoom call. It is easy to verify technology, but it is much more difficult to establish trust between people. There is no place for being lazy, the foundation and developers The higher the level of trust between them, the more resources both parties are willing to invest, and vice versa.
After the interview
After the interview, the DFINITY Foundation's Developer Grant Committee will make an evaluation based on the team's technical capabilities, understanding of ICP, and the potential impact of the product on the ICP ecosystem. Qualified teams will soon receive an email from the foundation. email of:
At this time, it can be said that your DFINITY Developer Grant has officially started. Many teams will take this opportunity to promote it on Twitter. This kind of exciting news is something we are happy to see. CBIndex’s official announcement is a good template:
TIP: You can request co-promotion on Twitter from DFINITY’s marketing team.
On the one hand, your team should have already started developing DApp. On the other hand, there are still two actions that need to be completed:
Fill in Program Milestone and Payment Exhibit in Submittable;
Complete the KYC (Know-Your-Customer) verification, otherwise you will not be able to receive ICP tokens.
These are all completed through email communication with the foundation's operations team. Please ensure that emails from the foundation do not enter the spam mailbox.
TIP: Please add grants@dfinity.org and @submittable.com to your email whitelist.
communicate
The development cycle of a typical developer grant is usually 3-4 months. The time is too short to make an impactful product, and the time is too long to keep up with the pace of market advancement. During this period, I hope developers can Maintain communication with the foundation and communicate at any time if you have any technical or market issues.
The main purpose of the existence of the DFINITY Foundation, in addition to continuing to develop the underlying protocol of ICP, is to support, incubate, and empower the ICP team in the community to solve problems for developers, which is our main daily work.
The functionality of WeChat is too rudimentary, so we try to establish continuous communication on Telegram and Twitter.
INFO: Please add Asia GM Herbert Yang’s Telegram ID: @yangherbert for easy group building.
In the DFINITY x XXX group on Telegram, you can invite your technical developers to join the group and discuss together.
If you have technical questions, you can raise them in the ICP China Twitter community, so that more developers can benefit from public answers, and the foundation can invite experts in various fields to answer questions.
Private one-to-one replies on WeChat or Telegram are too inefficient. We hope to make one-to-many or many-to-many communications as public as possible.
INFO - ICP China's Twitter community link:
twitter.com/i/communities/1679302895571988481
In addition, you must pay attention to the official developer forum (English) of the DFINITY Foundation. Discussions of major technical issues in the ICP ecosystem, whether from the foundation or the community, usually start from this forum.
Many researchers, developers, engineers, and team leads of the foundation's R&D team are deeply involved in forum discussions, including the founder of the foundation, Dom. The progress made by the R&D team on the ICP roadmap will be announced on the forum as soon as possible. .
INFO - DFINITY developer forum link:
forum.dfinity.org
There are other ways to communicate with the foundation, such as setting up a Slack group - but Slack is not convenient or popular in China, so the efficiency is limited.
The DFINITY Asia Pacific team has previously tried various community discussion tools, from WeChat groups, Telegram channels to Discord servers, and even OpenChat discussion groups, but the results were not satisfactory.
In addition to maintaining smooth communication with the foundation, it is also important to actively participate in activities in the ICP ecosystem. The prosperity of the ecosystem requires the collective power of the community to build it together. In the post-epidemic era, there are many opportunities to meet and communicate offline. The foundation also actively attends various events in the industry and holds developer gatherings with community partners.
We hope to see newly joined teams share their development experiences at community events, help us answer questions, and recruit developer friends around us.
Think not, what ICP can do for you.
Think, what you can do for ICP.
acceptance
After the Milestone is completed, mark it in Submittable, submit the necessary information, and then use Calendly to make an appointment with the DFINITY team for milestone acceptance (instructions will be provided in the Submittable email).
NOTE: The most important thing about the Milestone interview is the live demo. We only look at code demonstrations that can be verified on site.
This interview is not about looking at PPT, nor does it need to know the financing plan, nor does it need to share the latest BD cooperation, nor does it need to enjoy the grand vision of Web3, we only look at the code.
Therefore, please be sure to ask the team’s technical leader or developer to give a demonstration. The interview strictly follows the Milestone TODO list submitted by the team at the beginning to accept the development results. An efficient team will handle this interview like this:
Paste the milestone items in the Submittable into the Zoom conversation window;
According to the item list, share the desktop in Zoom and demo the code item by item;
If necessary, you can show the relevant code (locally or in a repo on Github that has not yet been open sourced) to DFINITY engineers for a look online;
Communicate some technical issues accumulated in daily life.
Next step
After the development of the first grant is successfully completed, it is just the first step. We hope that teams that are willing to delve into the ICP ecosystem will continue to apply for more follow-on grants. Many mature teams in ICP have received multiple DFINITY Foundation grants. developer grants.
TIP: The DFINITY Foundation welcomes ICP projects to apply for additional follow-on grants.
The end of the Grant is a comprehensive consideration and verification of the team's development capabilities, technology research and development capabilities, product implementation capabilities and community operation capabilities. It will also unlock a number of resources provided by the DFINITY Foundation to ICP ecological projects, such as:
Invited to participate in DFINITY Global R&D weekly meetings to do product demos;
Invited to participate in the ICP.Lab acceleration camp regularly held by the DFINITY Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland;
Recommendations and introductions from investment institutions and multiple institutional partners (exchanges, market makers, security audit companies, accelerators, corporate partners).
What the DFINITY Foundation is good at is building the lowest and most abstract technical protocols of the Internet. If the Internet computer, a highly disruptive technology, achieves mass adoption like the early Internet 30 years ago, it can benefit Internet users around the world - whether they are individuals or enterprises. , brings valuable services in daily life and work, and also requires community developers to develop more creative decentralized applications DApp.
We hope that in the future ICP ecosystem, a large number of super unicorns will emerge that change human life, redefine the ownership of data sovereignty, allow data to truly serve individuals, redefine the production relations and resource allocation of individuals and groups, and allow The light of individuals will always illuminate the path forward for human civilization.
There will be a time to ride the wind and waves, and hang sails directly to help the sea.
Come on, boys riding the wind!
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