Under the Vechain general grant program, a special track has been created for the Vechain-EasyA hackathon attendees to support their follow-up project development. The track will make funds available for 10 projects on a first-come, first served basis. Each project can be funded up to 30,000 USD.

Visit Vechain-EasyA-Hackathon-Boston-Oct-2023 to learn more about it.

• Introduction
• Guidelines
• Application Process
• Grant Committee
• Grant Evaluators
• Operation Team
• More Info

The general grant program is designed to fund projects covering a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to,

• Decentralized applications (e.g., gaming, DeFi, NFT, etc)
• Tools/libs for testing
• Tools/libs for frontend development
• Infrastructures (e.g., explorer, status dashboard, node service, etc)
• Interoperability
• Wallet integration
• Enterprise applications
• Research projects (e.g., tokenomics, governance, privacy, etc).

Each application can be funded up to $30,000. All Applications will be tracked on GitHub and disbursed in USDC.

In general, your project will have better chances to get accepted if:

• The subject has been well-studied, proven by a well-presented intro, including background, prior works, and relevant technical bases.
• Your team has proven experience with a relevant and solid technical/research background. For development projects, you should provide the GitHub profiles of your team members as part of your application. A list of your previously done projects will be highly recommended and beneficial. For research projects, CVs of all applicants should be attached.
• Your application is rich in technical details and well-defined.
• For development projects, you can demonstrate that the project will be maintained after completion of the grant, be it through an obvious commitment to the technology from your side, additional funding sources, or an existing business model.
• You should point out how your project stands out among competitors (e.g., it implements some technology that does not exist in the ecosystem yet).
• A direct contribution to Vechain's technology and/or ecosystem is a plus.

Additionally, it must fulfill the following requirements:

• We do not award grants for projects that have been the object of a successful token sale. However, we do not limit the project's option to do token sales in the future.
• Lastly, we do not fund projects that actively encourage gambling, illicit trade, money laundering, or criminal activities in general.

Note that your project will have to follow Grant Milestone Delivery to deliver milestones. In particular, we require your team to generate sufficient documentation about each delivery in order to unlock further funding if relevant. Examples, tutorials or videos can be very helpful for us to understand your work and therefore accelerate our evaluation process.

1. Application Preparation and Submission

   1. Fork this repository.
   2. In the newly created fork, create a copy of the application template (applications/application-template.md) or the research template(applications/research-template.md). Make sure you do not modify the template file directly.
   3. Name the new file after your project: project_name.md.
   4. Fill out the template with the details of your project. The more information you provide, the faster its review process will be.
   5. Once you're done, create a pull request. The pull request should only contain one new file, that is the Markdown file you created from the template.
   6. Please read the disclaimer carefully before applying for Vechain General Grant.

2. Preliminary Review

   After its submission, an application enters the preliminary review stage where an evaluator will be designated to check whether it is formatted correctly and includes all the requested information. The evaluator will label the pull request as "ready for committee review" if the application passes the preliminary review.

3. Committee Review

   A five-member grant committee will evaluate and make decisions on all the applications passing the preliminary review. The commitee may conditionally accept an application with further requirements for clarifications and amendments. The applicant(s) must address all the requirements via a new pull request. The application will then be accepted once the pull request is approved by one committee member. Final decisions made by the committee will be put on the website to notify applicants and the community.

4. Milestone Delivery and Payment

   Milestones are to be delivered on the Grant Milestone Delivery folder. You can find the delivery process here. Once the application is accepted, the payment for the first milestone will be immediately disbursed to fund the project. The payments of the rest milestones will be disbursed once their previous milestones are delivered and reviewed.

   The grant application can be amended at any time. However, this necessitates a reevaluation by the committee. 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.

• Overview of the accepted grants
• Milestone deliveries of the accepted grants

For the fund to be best utilized, the grant committee is designed to be as versatile as possible to represent different stakeholders in the vechain ecosystem. Following this principle, the committee is made of a committee chair, a member of Board of the Steering Committee, a member of the Vechain Core Dev, a community project leader and a collective community member consisting of outstanding community contributors.

The community project leader and collective community member will be chosen by our community for each funding round starting from the second round. We will announce the detailed rules and timeline of the whole election process in advance.

The current committee members are:

• Committee Co-Chairs:
  Peter Zhou - Chief Scientist of Vechain
  Dimitris Neocleous - UK and EU Ecosystem Manager of Vechain

• Member of Vechain Core Dev team:
  Bin Qian - Lead Dev of Core Dev team

• Vechain Ecosystem Project Representatives:
  Dyma Budorin - CEO of Hacken Foundation
  Jürgen Schouppe - Founding Director, CEO & CTO of Safe Haven

Evaluators are individuals who check whether the application is formatted correctly and includes all the requested information in the preliminary review stage. The following is the current list of evaluators:

• Tony Li

The operation team takes care of fund distribution.

• Sherry Li

• Vechain Dev Community Telegram
• Vechain Foundation Website
• Vechain Foundation Twitter
• Vechain Foundation Medium Channel
• VechainThor Mainnet Bug Bounty
• VechainThor Wallet Bug Bounty

GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0.