Akash Offers up to $100,000 in Grants Through New Developer Grant Program

Introducing the Akash Developer Grant Program

We’re excited to announce the launch of the Akash Developer Grant Program, a community-driven source of funding and support for promising developers and teams. The purpose of the program is to expand the developer community, encourage collaboration between developers, and develop open-source projects to promote further adoption and usage of Akash Network’s decentralized cloud.

Inspired by startup programs like AWS Activate and Y Combinator, the Developer Grant Program offers funding, guidance, support, and marketing for developers including:

Grants: Developers can apply for grants in amounts ranging from $100 to $100,000 paid in $AKT.
Office Hours: Office hours from Akash’s community and core development team to provide guidance and best practices as they build and test.
Collaboration: Every project funded will be open source and will have its own channel on Discord to communicate with the Akash community.
Powered by Akash: Promising projects will be featured on our forum and website to amplify attention.
Demo Days: The top developers will present their projects to investors, advisors, and other developers in the Akash community via blogs and Akash branded livestreams.

Eligibility for Grants

All software developers and engineers with a GitHub account are eligible.

What can I do with $AKT tokens?

You can use the grants for infrastructure services provided on the Akash Network:

Deploy container-based apps on managed Kubernetes.
Host websites on the Akash open-source cloud hosting platform.
Build web apps or API backends on robust infrastructure.
Apply for up to $100,000 from the Community Pool.
Securely lease out your data center as a provider.

How do I get help with Akash?

Getting Started Guides: Our guides and tutorials are written by the community to help you get started deploying on Akash quickly. Click here to get started.
Tech Support: Technical support for all developers is free regardless of how much AKT you spend, stake, or own. Get technical support here.
Ask us Anything: Have a question about Akash? Join the discussion on our active community forum, here.

Explore the Tiers

The Developer Grant Program has a wide range of award tiers, from $100 to $100,000. The amount of funding received depends on the milestones achieved and funding tiers unlocked.

To start, the program has four award tiers to support all types of projects large and small.

$100 Initiate Grant: The purpose of this funding is to support a large number of developers in running their first apps on Akash. If a developer sends these tokens to an exchange, they will be ineligible for future funding, as well as the next tier of funding.
$1,000 Seed Grant: The Seed Grant requires a developer to create a detailed proposal for their project and share this with the community for public comment and questions. Developers are expected to open source their project for the community, publish a detailed guide, and answer questions from the community.
$10,000 Incubator Grant: The Incubator Grant is awarded only if progress is made by the developer to meet the milestones in their proposal. The developers may be asked to present their project in a recorded livestream and answer questions live from the community.
$100,000 Accelerator Grant: The Accelerator Grant is only awarded to developers that have consistently met their milestones, demonstrated improvements, and shown a willingness to remain open source and collaborate with the Akash community.

All grants are paid in $AKT to the developer’s Akash account address. To prevent fraudulent activity, the account is linked to the developer’s accounts on Discourse, GitHub, and Discord. This award is a non-dilutive donation, and Akash’s treasury and community do not gain equity in projects with the grants. The grants must be used to deploy and run applications on Akash Network.

Milestones

Milestones for each project will be determined as part of the grant application. A milestone is a goal such as the development of a feature, the release of a working beta, and the completion of the work. A typical project should have 3-4 milestones and be completed within 2-4 months. Projects that complete their milestones will present to investors, advisors, and developers in the community on a scheduled Demo Day.

What types of projects will be funded?

We are committed to a transparent and clear process and we want to set expectations for the types of projects that will be considered for funding.

Projects that apply for grants from the developer program will need to outline how their project will contribute and add value to the Akash ecosystem.

Here are some examples of projects that we hope to see submitted:

Developer tooling for Akash including SDKs and APIs.
Open-source developer tools (Homebrew).
Creator platforms (CMS, podcasting, blogging, forums, GitLab).
Decentralized web services (Handshake, DNS, OpenRegistry).
Backend as a service (Hasura on Akash).
Platform as a service (Heroku on Akash).
Open-source communications (Chat, Email).
Desktop deployment interface.
Hosted deployment interface with wallet integration.
App Store interface (OpenChannel on Akash).
Persistent storage integrations (Sia, Skynet, Filebase, Arweave, Filecoin, Storj, Coldstack).

How will the projects be chosen?

Proposals will be reviewed by the Community Awards Board (CAB).

Each month the board will meet to review the proposals submitted by developers and craft on-chain proposals for the community to vote on. Meetings will be publicly announced and hosted online via Google Meet or Zoom. All meetings will be recorded and minutes will be shared publicly with the community.

The CAB is open to Akash customers, validators, providers, investors, advisors, employees, and former employees. If you’d like to nominate someone, please post your nomination publicly on the community forum’s Grant Applications.

Being a member of this board requires active participation to review developer applications and be involved in the decision-making and proposal writing process. Initially, voting requires attendance.

Referral Rewards

One of the main goals of the Developer Grant Program is to attract talented developers from across the globe. If you would like to invite a developer to the Akash developer program, create an invitation and share it with your social network. Each month, the community members with the most successful invitations will be awarded $100 or $1,000 in grants.

Incubators, accelerators, and VCs, oh my!

Akash will be partnering with other startup funds to provide free hosting on Akash. If you are a venture capital firm, accelerator, incubator, or other startup-enabling organization interested in providing Akash developer grants to your startups, contact partners@akash.network.

How will this be funded?

In order to scale the program quickly, the initial grants will be awarded by the Akash Treasury.

We are currently funding developers through five coding challenges. In the last 3 months, the Akash Treasury has awarded over 80 developers over 7,000 $AKT. Seven developers were winners of the Solana hackathon, and as part of the Sovrython hackathon, 37 developers received $100 of $AKT.

Grants over $1,000 will be proposed by the CAB to tap into the Community Pool. The CAB will work with developers to create proposals to fund projects and encourage voting by the community.

As of this article, the community pool is over one million tokens at 1,008,789 $AKT. The CAB may propose to award these grants directly to developers to reduce complexity or propose to award a grant to multi-signature wallets, managed by community members.