Grants Program Update, September 2023

The Sia Foundation has grant funding available for community contributors! The Grants Program was created to fund research, development, developer tools, and anything else that will support and further our mission of user-owned data while enriching the Sia ecosystem.

Just design a proposal that meets our requirements, submit to our forums, and wait for review by our grants committee. If your grant gets approved, you’re on your way to creating the next great project on the Sia storage network.

Check out our site for more info.

The Current State of Grants

Since last month, the Foundation grants committee has reviewed a number of grants, formally rejecting two of them and requesting additional info from another.

One rejection came from our latest marketing-oriented proposal. As a registered 501(c)(3) US non-profit entity, the Foundation has very strict guidelines on how we can market and otherwise talk about Sia. While this project was more about marketing the Grants Program than Sia itself, the possibility of violating rules stating that we cannot financially benefit one project over another is broad and not a line we want to cross.

Our other rejection came from the largest request we’ve received yet, and this was after multiple iterations done in an attempt to pare it down from it’s original $3,000,000 ask.

Finally, the committee asked for feasibility info regarding the last grant. Let’s hop in.

Proposal: Research Data Sharing

Link

What is it?

A project attempting to use Sia to share research data in more private and less expensive ways.

Grant Status

Rejected

Notes

Even after dropping from $3 million over three years to $150,000 over six months, the committee still had trouble evaluating this grant. The large budget request coupled with our inexperience in the target industry led to the decision.

One silver lining here is that it led to the committee working on new guidelines for grants of different sizes, currently up for discussion in the #community-proposals section of our Discord.

Proposal: Global Grants

Link

What is it?

A project looking to bring the Grants Program to a wider audience.

Grant Status

Rejected

Notes

The Foundation prefers to keep marketing discussions away from the lens of the Grants Program.

Proposal: Sia data sources for Grafana

Link

What is it?

This project wants to extend Grafana support to all new Sia apps

Grant Status

Info requested

Notes

The committee had questions about the feasibility of such a proposal, as well as the specifics of what this project would offer.

Coming Next

We encourage the community to provide their feedback and ask questions on the Sia Forum! Community contribution and input is the best way to push proposals and projects to the next level.

You can see the list of all proposals here, and our proposal requirements here. See you next month!

Steve

steveisonline on Discord

Grants Program Update, September 2023 was originally published in The Sia Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.