Blog Article
Stellar Community Fund 4.0: Bigger, Better, Faster, Soroban!
Author
DevRel Team
Publishing date
SCF
Projects
Ever wanted to be one of the first on the scene in a 100% greenfield ecosystem?
Now's your chance. Right now, you can join the early adopters of Soroban, Stellar’s new native smart contracts platform. You can build while the ecosystem is ripe for innovation and growth. And you can say, “I was there when it happened. I helped make it happen.”
We want you to help bootstrap the ecosystem of tools, protocols, dApps, and resources necessary for Soroban to thrive. And to support you as you experiment and build, we're mega-ultra-supersizing the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) to distribute more awards, and to do it more frequently.
As part of the $100 million Soroban Adoption Fund, this latest iteration of SCF is designed to create even more fertile ground to allow projects to sprout, grow, and blossom. At a high level, here's the deal:
- Submissions open on February 13, with the first deadline on March 12. It's easy to apply, so if you have something to build on Soroban and/or Stellar, head to communityfund.stellar.org to start your submission.
- Awards range from $10k-150k worth of XLM* depending on the size and scope of the project.
- Cycles run every 4 weeks, so there's a quick turnaround time on submission, review, and rewards, and several chances to participate over the next few months
What you need to know about SCF
The Stellar Community Fund, SCF for short, is an open-application program that draws on community input to distribute awards to support projects built on Stellar and Soroban. Over the past 5 years, it's help kickstart, launch, and grow over 400 Stellar-based projects.
SCF has worked so well that we decided to quintuple down on it, and to expand it to cover open-application funding for Soroban-based projects along with classic Stellar-based projects.
What’s new?
SCF is constantly evolving, and this iteration is way bigger than ever. It's scaled up to process and distribute more awards, and there's no cap to the number of projects that can win each round. We're going all in to encourage Soroban experimentation and innovation, and so right now, we're looking to award any project that's good enough to meet the selection criteria. That may not be true forever, but it's true today.
There's a ton of info about who, how, why, and what to submit in the SCF handbook, but the program is designed to award a range of applicants from individual developers to startups to long-lived companies to educators and community coordinators.
We also want to increase award velocity, so instead of running the program twice a year, we're going to hold rounds every 4 weeks. That means five rounds before Soroban’s launch on Mainnet!
Submission deadlines for the next 4 submission rounds are:
- March 12
- April 9
- May 7
- June 6
Awards for these rounds range from $10k-150K worth of XLM per project. Projects make a budget request denominated in USD, and the final payouts are in the equivalent amount of XLM. Here's a breakdown of the type of awards SCF offers:
Not ready to submit a SCF proposal yet?
For those of you who’ve made it this far, congrats! You now know that there’s a ton to gain here, and you’re excited about diving into Stellar and Soroban.
Interested in submitting, but not yet sure exactly how and what to build? SCF Kickstart (formerly Startup Camp) is back! Every quarter, SDF and DFS Lab host a 5-day long bootcamp that connects startups with members from SDF and the ecosystem to accelerate development from idea to viable solution on Soroban and/or Stellar. Apply to participate before March 28 to get selected for the first batch.
Need more time to play around with Stellar and Soroban and get inspired?
- Launch your blockchain education on Stellar Quest, which will take you through the basic building blocks of Stellar all the way to building smart contracts on Soroban.
- Experiment, build, and tinker in Sorobanathon: Equinox and potentially earn XLM for submitting tutorials, code examples, and more based on your experience building with Soroban.
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*All SCF Awards will be denominated in USD and distributed in XLM. To determine the number of XLM equal to the USD value of any Award, the USD valuation of XLM shall be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR), or, if such settlement price is unavailable or reasonably suspected by SDF to be unreliable, the settlement price as reported on a substantially similar and equally reputable cryptocurrency index provider as determined by the SDF in its discretion. The USD valuation of XLM for any particular Award shall be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price (or other agreed upon settlement price) reported on the day such Award is scheduled to be paid. The Participants acknowledge and understand that XLM is a highly risky and volatile asset, and that SDF does not provide any representations, warranties, or guarantees of its value.