Grants Program Update, April 2024

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 it 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

The committee has approved two new grants since our last update. Both grants focus on very close-to-home initiatives. One is a blockchain explorer, attempting to fill a hole that has grown over the past few years. While the Foundation provides a blockchain explorer, multiple options are the heart of decentralization, and some of the most creative additions to the Sia ecosystem have come from third party developer additions.

The other is a project offering expanded features and support for the already existing S5 project. Just as important, it comes from a different developer than the initial S5 grant. Growing mini-teams within our community of developers is pure value-add for Sia, and we’re really excited to support that type of work.

Among rejected grants proposals, we find projects that don’t quite fit into the current model of projects the committee wants to see. One project, PeopleLearn, received initial grant funding to implement a Sia integration for their existing project. Their rejection came in the form of a new grant aiming to build additional business prospects on top of their last. While it’s a good idea, the Grants Program is not the right avenue for what essentially boils down to startup venture capital funding.

Another project, a financial due diligence platform, suffered in the committee’s eyes from being too niche considering the plethora of centralized options available, as well as potential regulatory issues dealing with the handling of financial records rendering the project unusable. A nice idea, but again not the right fit for the Grants Program at this point.

Without further ado, here’s a recap of the latest approvals.

Proposal: Sia-Indexer

Link

What is it?

“Data explorers are of crucial importance for blockchain ecosystems because they enable easy access to data, visibility for users and interaction of different actors with developers within the ecosystem. The programmability of explorers provides many exciting opportunities while introducing additional complexity. The objective of Sia-Indexer is to reduce this complexity for both users and developers by producing an easy-to-access platform with functionality similar to those of the deprecated Siastats.”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

Submitting a grant to grow the slate of reliable, easy to use ecosystem projects specifically designed to enhance Sia is a great way to get an approval. This project aims to bring back some of the excellent functionality of the now offline Siastats.

Proposal: S5 ecosystem and Vup chat

Link

What is it?

“The S5 project is already known and funded by the Sia Foundation. This project is giving a grant to another developer to be able to work on more S5 related things. Redsolver and I have already talked at length about this and he will comment below about it.”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

Redsolver has done exceptional work with S5 development so far. To have Covalent work to extend and enhance the functionality was a pretty easy decision for the committee.

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

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Grants Program Update, April 2024 was originally published in The Sia Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.