SDF Ecosystem Updates: Lumen Distribution Programs

Recapping our statement last week, “While we have active distribution programs like the Stellar Build Challenge and the Partnership Grant Program, one of the things we’ve heard requested is a method for the community to participate in guiding lumen distribution. Therefore we’re excited to announce the Stellar Community Fund.”

The goal of the Community Fund is to award projects the community deems of high value to the ecosystem, or otherwise worthy of support. Unlike the SBC, which is judged by SDF, the Community Fund will be run completely by people voted-in by the Stellar community. SDF will oversee the pool, but distribution will be handled by these elected Community Ambassadors. This system should incentivize community members to choose ambassadors that are diligent and motivated. The community fund pool can be used for any project these ambassadors deem worthy (applications, artwork, tutorials, etc)!

Ambassadors will be voted in by the community bi-annually. This gives them 6 months of access to the funding pool. In order to award a project, delegates will take proposals from projects and community members. After reviewing, Ambassadors will vote on whether or not to pass the proposal. If the proposal passes review, ambassadors will decide how many lumens to grant to a project out of the pool. Once the pool is depleted for a cycle, no new grants can be given.

Stay tuned for more details! We’ll publish the full program description on Stellar.org in Jan 2019.

The Partnership Grant Program was established in 2017 to provide support for exceptional projects in the Stellar ecosystem, and to encourage targeted development around activities fundamental to the growth of the network.

We are pleased to share that since its inception, the program has awarded 34 companies, from all over the world, representing a diverse mix of use-cases and communities. These 34 companies were selected out of 450+ applications received since the program began.

In our experience administering the Partnership Grant Program we have learned a tremendous amount. Foremost, it takes a lot of work to manage and operate a high caliber grant program. However, through this experience, we are more certain than ever of the value this program can bring to the Stellar ecosystem. While it continues to be a learning process, we now know we can build long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships that have multiplier effects in the ecosystem.

Looking ahead into 2019, there will be a revision to the current Call for Partnerships criteria, expanding on or highlighting new focus areas in the ecosystem for institutional engagement.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Stellar Academic Research program, to provide funding opportunities for high-quality academic research.

Here is a description of the program:

The Stellar Development Foundation is soliciting proposals for basic research advancing the foundation's goals of financial inclusion, fast and inexpensive cross-border payments, efficient decentralized markets, and other beneficial applications of distributed ledger technology.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Decentralized global consensus without mining, including improvements to or analysis of the Stellar Consensus Protocol
• Incentive design for improving financial responsibility, civic engagement, or other behaviors promoting financial security and democracy
• Byzantine fault tolerant, Sybil-resistant, open peer-to-peer multicast, particularly solutions leveraging quorum slices
• Adaptations of traditional market mechanisms (such as short selling and derivatives) to Stellar or other distributed ledgers
• Scalability improvements, including techniques for deterministically parallelizing transactions on order books or extending on-chain order books to work with off-chain payment channels
• 2-way pegged side chains across ledgers employing quorum slices
• Privacy, including improvements to both efficiency and regulatory compliance of private payments
• Empirical studies of the Stellar network or lumen distribution Programs

You can find a full description of the program, and details on how to submit a proposal here.

As a follow-up to last weeks announcement of the Cluster program, you can use this link to either register as a Cluster, or to receive more details on the program.

We will publish the full program description and directory on Stellar.org in Jan 2019.

Next week we'll return with our final post in the series.