Polymesh Grants Program

• 👋 Introduction
  • Guidelines
  • Project ideas
  • Support
• 🎚️ Levels
• 📝 Process
  • 1. Application
  • 2. Application Review
  • 3. Milestone Delivery and Payment
  • Changes to a Grant after Approval
• 📬 Suggest a Project
• 🙏 Acknowledgements
• 💡 Help
  • Additional information
  • Real-time conversation

👋 Introduction

At the Polymesh Association, we want to improve and extend the Polymesh ecosystem. We offer a Grants Program to award grants to our community developers for building and extending Polymesh features. In this repo, you'll find how to apply for a grant using our Grants Program. For more information about Polymesh, visit our website.

Guidelines

Anyone is welcome to apply for a grant. Projects funded through our programs are broad in scope, but our focus lies on strong technical projects that add value to the Polymesh 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, be it through an obvious commitment to the technology from your side, additional funding sources or an existing business model.
• 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 these 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.
• You can clearly present how your project stands out among competitors or implements technology that doesn't exist in the ecosystem yet.

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 successful token sale.
• 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 for funding. Tutorials or videos are also helpful for new users to understand how to use your product.

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.

Project ideas

Requests For Proposals (RFPs) represent concrete ideas for projects that we would like to see implemented and can be a good example of ideas to consider. Several teams may apply for the same RFP, so even if another team has already applied to implement a certain RFP, we invite you to do the same if you're interested.

Support

The scope of our Grants Programs consists of funding and feedback on delivered milestones. This means that we do not provide hands-on support as part of a grant, but if you face specific issues during development, we will do our best and try to direct you to the correct resources. We encourage you to join the community in order to get help with specific issues or to stay up to date with the most recent developments.

🎚️ Levels

The Polymesh Grants Program offers different grant levels to help you best depending on your current stage.

🐣 Level 1 (= InstaGrants)

• Target: Individuals & small teams
• Amount: Up to US$10,000 (paid in POLYX)

🐤 Level 2

• Target: Small teams/start-ups
• Amount: Up to US$30,000 (paid in POLYX)

🐓 Level 3

• Target: Companies/foundations with a proven track record
• Amount: Up to US$50,000 (paid in POLYX)

📝 Process

📢 The process below is independent of the level.

1. Application

1. Fork this repository.
2. In the newly created fork, create a copy of the application template (applications/application-template.md). If you're using the GitHub web interface, you will need to create a new file and copy the contents of the template inside the new one. 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 the review. Please refer to our Grant guidelines for most popular grant categories and make sure your deliverables present a similar same level of detail. Naturally, if you're only applying for a smaller grant that only consists of, say, UI work, you don't need to provide as much detail.
5. Once you're done, create a pull request. The pull request should only contain one new file—the Markdown file you created from the template.
6. 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.
7. Submitting the Pull Request will mean that you have agreed to the terms and conditions

2. Application Review

1. The reviewers can issue comments and request changes on the pull request.
2. 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 1 week, the application will be closed due to inactivity, but you're always free to reopen it as long as it hasn't been rejected.
3. When all requested changes are addressed and the terms and conditions have been signed, someone will mark your application as ready for review and share it internally with the rest of the reviewers.
4. The application will be accepted and merged as soon as it is approved by the approvers, or closed after one 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.

3. Milestone Delivery and Payment

1. Milestones are to be delivered on the Grant Milestone Delivery repository following the process described therein.

Changes to a Grant after Approval

• Accepted grant applications can be amended at any time. However, this necessitates a reevaluation by the reviewers . 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 signficantly 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.

📬 Suggest a Project

If you think that we should support the development of certain tools or projects that aren't in the Polymesh ecosystem, 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 RFP (Request for Proposals):

Ideas generally have better chances of being implemented if they're presented in a project outline format that can be picked up straight away by a team, so if you have a good concept of the milestones required to bring your project to life, you can follow the process below and directly submit an RFP:

1. Fork this repository.
2. In the newly created fork, create a copy of the suggestion template (rfps/suggestion-template.md) inside the rfps folder. Make sure you create a new file and copy the contents of the template into the new one, and do not modify the template file directly.
3. Name the file after your idea: project_name.md.
4. Fill out the template with the project details. Please include as many details as possible.
5. Once you're done, create a pull request. The pull request should only contain one new file—the Markdown file you created from the template.
6. You will see the same template as for creating an application. Please replace it with this one.

🙏 Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Web3 Foundation for creating their excellent grants program (https://github.com/w3f/Grants-Program) which inspired our grants program.

💡 Help

Additional information

Polymesh Website	Polymesh Twitter	Polymesh Medium	Polymesh YouTube

Real-time conversation

We have a Discord server with various channels for real-time discussions on Polymesh related topics. Join the conversation.

• Polymesh Developers Discord

ℹ️ License

Apache License 2.0 © Polymesh Association