Funding Program Overview

The Interchain Foundation (ICF) is proud to have funded a wide variety of projects supporting its mission to research, develop, and promote open, decentralized networks.

Now that the Cosmos Network has launched, the community has grown, and the software has matured significantly, it’s important that activities in the ecosystem continue to diversify and decentralize. In a healthy and resilient ecosystem, we expect to see responsibilities distributed across many sustainable, independent, developer entities, with clear separation of concerns and clear modes of collaboration between them. The Interchain Foundation will encourage ongoing decentralization of the Cosmos ecosystem in many ways, one of which is through our funding program. The ICF will continue to fund research, engineering, product, community and social good initiatives in order to develop scalable, usable, and interoperable blockchain research and applications that can have real-world impacts.

This blog post provides a high level overview of our funding program. For a deeper dive into what projects we have been funding and how they fit into the mission and vision of the ICF, see the complete projects list. To learn more about our funding criteria and funding program please see: https://interchain.io/funding/

About the Funding Program

The ICF segments funding into three categories; Research, Engineering + Product, Community + Social Good.

Categories:

1. Research: Long-term contributions to the community in areas of distributed systems, cryptography, formal verification etc. Research should eventually be translated into engineering development.
2. Engineering + Product: Engineering is work that is directly and immediately needed for the software to support and expand the Cosmos Network. For example, work on ABCI frameworks, pegs, IBC, serialization, databases, etc. Products take engineering work and turn it into something users can interact with (ex. block explorers, wallets, staking tools etc).
3. Community + Social Good: Community development means creating awareness, recognition and education to grow and develop the Cosmos community at large (ex. meetups, conferences, hackathons). The ICF is also committed to investing in a sustainable future and we will allocate small portions of funding towards social good projects (ex. human rights, education, accessibility etc).

Within these three categories we use 3 different tools for funding; Service Agreements, Grants, and Investments.

Tools:

1. Services Agreements: Service agreements are used to fund and realize well-defined short-term projects, primarily engineering and product development projects, that satisfy the near-term goals of the Foundation. Companies that engage in Service Agreements will act as vendors/consultants to the Foundation.
2. Grants: A grant award is an investment in positive change. More specifically, it is monetary assistance provided by the Foundation to individuals and/or projects. Grants are provided to projects that the Foundation believes will make a big impact; projects that are at the intersection of meeting the needs of the community and working towards the mission of the Foundation of supporting open and decentralized networks. Typically grants are made to support research and development, infrastructure projects, or projects that have a strong social mission.
3. Investments: Investments are a source of financing specifically for businesses that help advance the growth of the Cosmos Network. In return for the investment, the business will allocate a portion of equity or tokens to the Interchain Foundation.

Conclusion

Is the next addition to the list your team? Are you interested to learn more about the ICF funding process?

Check out our GitHub page with all the details HERE.

We will update the list in GitHub and on our website as we fund projects on a quarterly cadence.

Apply for Q3 funding NOW!