Context of the bounty: please see this post first. Astar Network joins forces with Parity and select Parachain teams to create the ink!ubator Bounty, a program to support and encourage the development of ink! projects, open-source templates, and contract auditing for Polkadot’s native Wasm environment.
Parachains on Polkadot are the unique unlock that enables the network's shared security and native interoperability to be utilized by a diverse variety of dApps. This has been demonstrated with smart contract focused parachains in particular, which currently lead the network in terms of adoption and activity. While this trend will certainly continue, there is still a largely underutilized opportunity to create more sophisticated and user-friendly applications through Polkadot’s Wasm compatibility and native smart-contracting language, ink!.
As it stands, Polkadot has yet to take full advantage of its superior technical infrastructure and, consequently, resembles other EVM chains in terms of meaningful activity. With the final audit of ink! soon to be completed, we still see a few blockers to unleash the potential of Wasm in the ecosystem.
Anyone is welcome to apply for a grant. Projects funded through our bounty are limited in scope, but our focus lies on strong Wasm template that add value to the Wasm smart contract ecosystem.
Generally, your project will have better chances to be accepted if:
- It presents a well-researched or tested concept, for which ideally you are able to show some prior work.
- You can demonstrate that the project will be maintained after completion of the grant.
- Your team has proven experience with the relevant languages and technologies and/or a strong technical background. You will be asked to provide the GitHub profiles of your team members as part of your application, which we will examine for past activity and code quality. Naturally, you can also link to projects on other platforms.
- Your application is rich in technical details and well-defined.
Additionally, it must fulfill the following requirements:
- All code produced as part of a grant must be open-sourced, and it must also not rely on closed-source software for full functionality. We prefer Apache 2.0, but GPLv3, MIT or Unlicense are also acceptable.
- We do not award grants for projects that have been the object of a token sale.
- Applications must not mention a specific token. Furthermore, the focus of the application should lie on the software that is being implemented/research being carried out as part of the grant, and less on your project/venture/operation. For the purpose of the application and delivery, think about how others might also benefit from your work.
- As a general rule, teams are asked to finish a grant before applying for another one.
- Lastly, we do not fund projects that actively encourage gambling, illicit trade, money laundering or criminal activities in general.
In addition to the information provided on your application, note that your project will need to comply with our Guidelines for Milestone Deliverables. In particular, we require all projects to create documentation that explains how their project works. At a minimum, written documentation is required.
Please also read our Announcement Guidelines for grant-related communications.
Finally, we take licensing and the right of all teams in and outside the ecosystem to be recognised for their work very seriously. Using others' work with no attribution or indication that this was not your own work as part of a milestone delivery will lead to immediate termination. Please reach out to us before submitting if you have any doubts on how to comply with a specific license and we'll be happy to help.
Canary dApps: One of the goals of this bounty is to encourage the development of so-called Canary dApps. A Canary dApp is one that could be deployed on to a value bearing network, but may not necessarily be battle hardened enough for serious use cases. They are meant to be a step beyond simple tutorials while still being self-contained enough to provide a useful reference for developers building production grade dApps. We assume that a Canary dApp is one which can be built by a small team of developers (1-3) in a relatively short period of time (1-3 months). We would like these dApps to also be audited. This will give teams from the Contract Auditor Program an opportunity to test their skills in a low-stakes environment, and to give confidence to the teams who may want to use these as references.
Canary dApps These dApps listed below are ideas and not prescriptive to what may be funded. We will fund up to 5 projects as the first track of this bounty.
- Lending application that allows users to earn interest on deposits and borrow assets with a variable or stable interest rate. (2 types)
- Liquid staking a liquid staking provider takes token deposits, stakes those tokens, and gives the depositor a receipt which is redeemable for the staked tokens.
- Aggregator that unites separate decentralized protocols and aggregates liquidity from a variety of decentralized exchanges to facilitate cost-efficient transactions.
- Stablecoin that enables over-collateralized loans by locking DOT assets in a smart contract and minting stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.
- Stablecoin Swap optimized for low slippage swaps between stablecoins or similar assets that peg to the same value.
- Derivatives and Synthetic Asset Platform that provides on-chain exposure to real-world currencies, commodities, stocks, and indices.
- NFT Marketplace that allows people to list, exchange and mint NFTs
- Guild Platform like DAO which seeks to provide a key on-ramp to the world of Play-to-Earn gaming.
- ink! Domain Name Service a distributed and open-source naming system that maps human-readable names to machine-readable identifiers.
The scope of our Bounty Program consists of funding and feedback on delivered milestones. This means that we do not provide hands-on support as part of a bounty, but if you face specific issues during development, we will do our best and try to direct you to the correct resources. You can find general documentation and more information on ink! on the use.ink website.
For questions about the grants program itself, see our FAQ.
The curators consists of individuals, and are responsible for evaluating bounty applications and providing feedback on these.
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Sam Ruberti from Parity Technologies: Sam Ruberti is a Senior Rust Developer with ink! and has over twelve years of experience delivering full-stack products for companies including Bloomberg, Peloton, and Clear, and five years of experience building full-stack Dapps in production environments. He has built microservices, DeFi platforms, NFTs, and contributed to open-source libraries for Ethereum.
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Sota Watanabe Astar Foundation: Sota Watanabe is the founder of Astar Network. He joined the web3 space in 2015 and started developing Astar Network in 2019. Apart from his achievements, he is a director of the Japan Blockchain Association and used to be a blockchain researcher at the University of Tokyo and a task force member of Trusted Web led by the Japanese government. In addition to that, he was chosen for Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in the IT division and Forbes 30 Under 30 Japan.
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Hernando Castano from Parity Technologies: Hernando is a Core Developer at Parity Technologies. Hernando joined the blockchain space in 2017, initially curious about the world of smart contracts on Ethereum. In 2019, Hernando joined Parity Technologies to work on the Parity Ethereum client, and has since transitioned to the team working on the ink! programming language.
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Markian Ivanichok 727 Ventures: Founder & CEO at 727.ventures, Brushfam & Dedali Metaverse. Web3 entrepreneur, Software Engineer. Brushfam onboards businesses to Polkadot WASM. Projects: Openbrush(Openzeppelin of WASM ink!), Typechain for ink!, sol2ink (transpiler from solidity to ink!), and substrate/ink! contribution itself. Also, WASM conference, was the first web3 WASM conference and gathered ~1000 participants.
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Hang Yin from Phala Network: Co-founder and CTO at Phala Network. 5 years of Web3 core development and entrepreneur experience. Author of Phala Network Technical Whitepaper. Lead the team to build an off-chain computing protocol based on ink! and Substrate with 30k online servers. Ex-Googler on Machine Learning before joining Web3.
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Michał Świętek , Development Lead at Aleph Zero: For a couple of years, Michał has been fully devoted to the Aleph Zero project. From co-designing novel consensus mechanisms, and writing the first lines of code in core repositories, to the high-level architecture of Aleph Zero node implementation.
📢 Payment is made in DOT (on Polkadot).
- Please read our FAQs, announcement guidelines to familiarize yourself with the subtleties of bounty, applications and the program as a whole.
- Fork this repository.
- In the newly created fork, create a copy of the application template (
applications/application-template.md). - Name the new file after your project:
project_name.md. - Fill out the template with the details of your project. The more information you provide, the faster the review. Make sure your deliverables present a similar same level of detail.
- Once you're done, create a pull request in our main Bounty Program repository. The pull request should only contain one new file—the Markdown file you created from the template.
- You will see a comment template that contains a checklist. You can leave it as is and tick the checkboxes once the pull request has been created. Please read through these items and check all of them.
- The Curators can (and usually does) issue comments and request changes on the pull request.
- Clarifications and amendments made in the comments need to be included in the application. You may address feedback by directly modifying your application and leaving a comment once you're done. Generally, if you don't reply within 2 weeks, the application will be closed due to inactivity, but you're always free to reopen it as long as it hasn't been rejected.
- When all requested changes are addressed and the terms and conditions have been signed, someone will mark your application as
ready for reviewand share it internally with the rest of the committee. - The application will be accepted and merged as soon as it receives the required number of approvals, or closed after two weeks of inactivity. Unless specified otherwise, the day on which it is accepted will be considered the starting date of the project, and will be used to estimate delivery dates.
Milestones are to be delivered on the Bounty Milestone Delivery repository following the process described therein.
- Accepted bounty applications can be amended at any time. However, this necessitates a reevaluation by the committee and the same number of approvals as an application. If your application has been accepted and, during development, you find that your project significantly deviates from the original specification, please open a new pull request that modifies the existing application. This also applies in case of significant delays.
- If your delivery schedule significantly changes, please also open a pull request with an updated timeline.
- If your deliveries are significantly delayed and we cannot get a hold of you, we will terminate the grant (3 approvals required, regardless of level. If a member of the committee creates the termination PR, only 2 more approvals are required).
If you think that we should support the development of certain tools or projects that aren't in the bounty application, feel free to submit a suggestion using the process described below. We are particularly interested in supporting projects that could be leveraged by other builders in our ecosystem.
Submit an idea:
If you have an idea for a project or would like to highlight an area in which you'd like to see teams build, but lack the technical background to create a detailed outline, you're welcome to open an issue. We will review your suggestion and, if necessary, will create an RFP based on it and reach out to teams able to build it.
We have Matrix/Element channels for real-time support regarding running bounties. Join the conversation.
Besides, we also have a community room for all bounty recipients. Head over to that room to share your experience with other grantees, ask bounty-related questions or simply hang out:
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