#BuildOnZIL: Introducing the Zilliqa Ecosystem Grant Programme

Zilliqa is a project that has brought together leading academics, engineers, and entrepreneurs with the goal of building a better blockchain infrastructure that is scalable and secure. To do this, we have built the first blockchain platform that uses the technology of sharding to enable increasing throughput as the network expands. The second piece of the vision of Zilliqa is to fix major security issues with existing smart contracts. To achieve this, we are introducing a new, intermediate-level smart contract language called Scilla, which will allow developers to more easily write secure smart contract applications.

Over the coming months and leading up to our mainnet launch in Q3, we are continuing to develop the Zilliqa platform and Scilla (with a new major release scheduled for the end of this month) and have already begun to announce some of the initial projects that will be building their applications on our new high-throughput platform. Building on Zilliqa will be secure, scalable and ideally suited for a new class of blockchain applications in payments, finance, gaming, digital advertising, media, and more.

To encourage the development and adoption of applications that are built on our platform we are pleased to announce the details of the Zilliqa Ecosystem Grant Programme — a pool of $5 million USD that will be given to great projects, teams, and individuals to start building tools and applications for the Zilliqa platform.

Objective: To support and encourage great individuals/teams around the world to start developing tools, libraries and Dapps for the Zilliqa platform

Total Grant Pool: USD 5,000,000 equivalent

Disbursement method: Minimum 30% ZILs, remainder can be in USD/ETH

Disbursement schedule: The teams will work with Zilliqa on a set of technical milestones and corresponding deliverables. The award will be dispatched in three batches: initial payment, mid-term payment after some milestones have been reached and the final payment after the project is completed. For each project, the code has to be open-sourced and the team should be responsible for its maintenance for at least one year.

What we offer:

  1. Non-dilutive funding
  2. Technical advice (subject to Zilliqa team’s resources)
  3. A feature on the Zilliqa website/other channels as the first batch of tools/Dapps on Zilliqa

Selection process:

  • Application starts on 19 June 2018 and will be evaluated in batches
  • Individuals/teams with relevant development experience or an MVP on another public blockchain will have priority
  • Evaluation will be done by the Zilliqa team
  • Tasks may be closed off once awarded, so we encourage everyone to apply as early as possible
  • Applications do not guarantee grant awards

We are looking for individuals/teams to work on the following:

Tools and Libraries

Project duration: ~1 month

Indicative grant amount: Around USD 5K, up to USD 10K

  • Plugin support for existing editors such as Sublime
  • Remix-like IDE*
  • Cross-OS support, e.g., Windows

Project duration: 2–3 months

Indicative grant amount: Around USD 10K, up to USD 20K

  • A browser extension to integrate with Zilliqa wallets
  • Block explorer*
  • Web wallet, desktop/mobile wallet*
  • GPU mining scripts and automatic mining switching software for different tokens
  • Libraries like Zeppelin
  • Porting web3.js to Zilliqa

*Such projects are expected to provide greater user experiences than our current testnet wallet https://wallet.zilliqa.com/home, explorer https://explorer.zilliqa.com/home and the Scilla web IDE to be released.

Project duration: 3–6 months

Indicative grant amount: Around USD 20K, up to USD 50K

  • Development framework such as Truffle
  • Debugger for Scilla
  • Static and dynamic analysis tools for Scilla
  • Support for conversion from higher-level languages (Python or Solidity like) to Scilla
  • Other accompanying infrastructure such as state channels.

Dapps

Project duration: 6–8 months

Grant amount to be decided on a case-by-case basis

  • DEX, games, stable coin, auctions, marketplaces
  • Other Dapps

Disclaimer: Decisions regarding the awarding and dispatching of the grant are at the full discretion of the Zilliqa team and are final. The team reserves the rights to stop payments if chosen projects are unable to meet milestones at a satisfactory level. We also reserve the rights to restrict awardees from certain jurisdictions for compliance reasons.

TO APPLY: Please fill out the form here, https://goo.gl/forms/cD9m8Hv3yM10h6gl1

To discuss more and to form teams with fellow developers and enthusiasts, please join us on our dedicated Gitter channel.

For general updates and discussions you can join us on

Twitter, Slack, Telegram, Reddit.