Development Awards Program
The Algorand Foundation is excited to announce its first Development Awards Program, designed to support innovation that helps to grow the Algorand ecosystem. As part of its vision of enabling a broad and active blockchain development community, the Algorand Foundation is committed to supporting that community, as they explore the opportunities for innovation that exist within the Algorand Blockchain ecosystem. The Foundation is interested in development areas such as applications, utilities, monitoring, tooling, deployment and libraries but importantly, is open to any other areas of innovation around the Algorand blockchain. Applications will be judged on creativity, utility and code conciseness.
This first awards program will run for six months (or when the awards pool is exhausted, whichever occurs first). The supported proposals will be listed on our website as successful award recipients to highlight your work. We are also eager to gain input from the community on ideas that might inform the next iterations of our developer programs. The competition is open to professional developers, companies, enthusiast developers and students. For greater detail see below or apply directly via this form.
Project Submission Process
If you are interested in submitting an application for review please follow the process below. If you are looking for project types that the Foundation is interested in seeing built see Needed Applications and Enabling Technology.
- This process is meant only for submission of working applications. This does not mean the application has to be fully completed, but it must demonstrate working technology on the Algorand blockchain.
- To apply you must complete a short form here that describes your application, explains where it can be viewed, and states whether the application is open sourced. You need to describe in detail what the application does and how it enhances to the Algorand ecosystem. The form must also include your email address, after submitting the form you will be notified by email if and when you need to proceed to step 3.
- In order to judge the application, the Foundation needs to be able to examine the source code, whether you open source the application or not. This can be done by sharing a public repository or by submitting a request with the Foundation to have the code looked at in a private repository. In the latter case you must provide the Foundation with temporary access to your repository. This can be done using the foundation GitHub handle @algofoundation or contact the Foundation at [email protected] for other repository systems.
- The Algorand Foundation will acknowledge receipt of your submission within a week. The Foundation will review your application and may reach out to you by email to get more details or schedule a call to discuss your project further.
- The Foundation will contact within a month about the status of your application. Usually, at that time, the Foundation will notify you whether you application has been approved and what grant size your project will receive. But more complex projects may take longer to evaluate. See Award Sizes below for details on award amounts.
Award Sizes
This award program is not intended to fund the entirety of building your application. The Foundation has no ownership in your project, and offers these awards as a way to incentivize developers to build applications and utilities that are valuable across the entire ecosystem. When determining award sizes, the Foundation will also take into account the need of the project. Open source projects are preferred and licensing may be used in adjudicating awards.
The Foundation divides awards into four categories based on complexity and usefulness to the community:
- Extra small - 5K-20K Algo award.
- Small - 20K-50K Algo award.
- Medium - 50K-100K Algo award.
- Large - 100K-250K Algo award. This represents the maximum award a project will receive from the Foundation.
Projects are not limited to just submitting one application to the grant program. Every new project will be reviewed in isolation and will not affect any other submission.
Documentation
As with any project, documentation is vitally important for a projects success. Adequately documenting how to use your project or utility is required. The Foundation may after reviewing your application come back with the suggestion to improve your docs before awarding a grant. The Foundation may also require that the participant writes a post on the developer.algorand.org portal, describing the winning project.
Needed Applications and Enabling Technology
As with any ecosystem, ease of use and extended capabilities often help to drive the success of the platform. Below is a list of areas that the Foundation is interested in seeing extended and built upon. This list is not extensive and we encourage you to apply even if you have an application or utility outside the scope of the list below.
Applications:
Materials tracking Applications
Lending Applications
Real Estate Applications
Medical Recording
Notary Applications
Auction Applications
Applications connecting with BigData systems
Product Rating Applications
Payments
Authorization of Identities
Voting Applications
Multi-party transaction Management Applications
Billing Applications
Asset Management Applications
Asset Exchanges
Tooling:
IDEs and Extensions
VS Code or other IDE extensions for TEAL scripts
Editor extensions for any of the SDKs (Java, JS, Go, Python)
TEAL Editor and Testing Framework
Asset Creation and Deployment GUI
GUIs for Command Line Tools like Goal
PWA/Web Based GUI for Command Line tools
Deployment:
Automatic creation for Private Networks within GUI
Automatic deployment and testing with TestNet
Deployment to MainNet
Connections with other chains
Notification engine (Pub/sub)
Language And Libraries:
Extending REST API to other Languages such as C#, php, etc
Components build in popular frameworks like Vue, React, Angular that provide easy chain integration
External framework integrations ie Alexa, Messaging Integration, etc
Monitoring:
Traffic/Trend Statistics