Gitcoin on Fantom – the details

Builders and projects, get ready to submit your application to the Gitcoin grants program! We are excited to announce that the grants program will open for applications on November 14, 2022, with voting set to commence in December.

In this initial funding round, the Foundation is allocating 125,000 FTM in matching incentives to support projects building on Fantom. These funds will be distributed to eligible grant applicants using Gitcoin Quadratic Funding.

What is the Gitcoin grants protocol?

The Gitcoin grants protocol will allow teams building on Fantom to present their work to the broader community and crowdsource financial support. The Fantom Foundation will use the grants protocol's technology to match public contributions made to projects with funds earmarked as part of the Fantom Incentive Program

The Gitcoin grants protocol and the Fantom Foundation will work together to vet grant-seeking projects, so community members can rest assured that their donations are going to legitimate builders. Any screening that Gitcoin and Fantom perform is for verification only; judgments about which projects should be funded are left entirely to the public.

How are grants allocated?

This is the fun part. The answer is through a voting process involving quadratic funding. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t: the basic idea is that the more donations a project gets from different community members, the larger the matching funding will be.

For instance, consider a scenario in which project A receives a total of $1000 from 1 community member, and Project B receives a total of $100 from 10 community members. Since it attracted more donors, Project B will receive more funding from the matching fund pool than Project A. Gitcoin’s video illustrates the example in detail.

Who can apply?

Anyone can apply. More details will be released soon, but at an absolute minimum, applicants should have:

• A project wallet address (as applicable)
• An open GitHub repository with a record of initial progress (as applicable)
• A rationale for their project (i.e., an explanation of how it serves the public and the ecosystem)

When can projects apply?

The application portal will open on November 14, and voting will commence in December 2022.

Eligibility Criteria

Fantom Foundation (“the Foundation”) holds sole discretion on which grants are eligible for matching. Disputes will be handled by the GitcoinDAO Public Goods Funding Workstream, consulting with the Foundation's round representatives.

Here are key factors for determining whether your project is eligible to be a grant included in the Fantom Ecosystem Round:

1. The Grant must be in support of, or directly advancing the Fantom community and/or protocol.
2. The Grant may not have any form of quid pro quo that has financial value (a scenario in which a user gets some additional unique benefit/award in return for their donation)
3. The Grant owner must be directly affiliated with the project, the funds must go to the project, and be used for the purposes stated in the Grant’s details.
4. The project must not be in violation of any laws.
5. The Grant should be focused on accomplishing the following for Fantom:
   1. Usability - improving the user experience in order to further accelerate the usage and adoption of Fantom in web3
   2. Community - growing the ecosystem
   3. Tooling - improving the developer experience of building and launching applications and protocols on top of Fantom, for instance by improving standards, packages, and libraries
   4. Infrastructure - improving the interaction and performance of application servers, application clients, and fantom nodes
   5. Security - improving the security of the Fantom ecosystem through tools and enhancements that facilitate a safer environment for both users and builders
   6. Education - increasing Fantom awareness and competency for users and builders across all levels of the knowledge spectrum
   7. Applications - supporting applications and/or protocols that implement products or services on top of Fantom
   8. What else? - get creative!
6. The project should not have raised funding (let’s keep the funds for the aspiring projects without financial backers!)
7. The project must have been active in the last 3 months, such as on social media and github.
8. The project should be open source.
9. If the Grant project is a fork of an existing codebase or otherwise directly derived from an existing project, meaningful improvements need to be made in order to be eligible. Straight 1:1 duplicates of existing projects repurposed for use on Fantom are explicitly not eligible.
10. If the Grant project no longer satisfies above criteria, its eligibility will be voided and existing grant may be revised.

There will be a 10% matching cap in this round (meaning the most matching any one grant can receive is 10% of the total pool.

Grant Ideas and Inspiration

The Fantom Foundation supports active projects in the following verticals:

Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Developer Tooling and Developer Education

Gaming, and Metaverse

Decentralized Governance

NFTs and NFT Tooling

Community Tooling or Community Involvement

P2P Insurance

Supply Chain Tracking / Providence

Decentralised Digital Identity

Fantom’s partnership with the Gitcoin grants protocol demonstrates the Foundation’s commitment to supporting builders and projects on the network. Keep up with Fantom and Gitcoin on Twitter for more updates as the application period draws closer.