Budget

SCF’s goal is to fund projects beneficial to the Stellar and Soroban ecosystems. When applying to an SCF Round, you select your own budget amount. While you will denominate that budget in USD, the final payouts will be in the equivalent amount of XLM*.

The SCF Award is meant to support:

If a project has never received an SCF before, they have to submit for an Activation Award first. Please check out the Awards Structure to learn more.

What SCF Awards are for

The budget should cover direct development costs of the Project, and the scope of the work should be no more than three months. This can include costs related to security audits and necessary legal reviews. Funding is not meant to cover costs associated with user acquisition, so focus your budget and deliverables on product/service development on Stellar and Soroban. SCF Awards are not meant to sustain Projects: if you are building out a Project, you need to present a plan for how the Project will sustain itself without continued funding from SCF Awards.

When sizing your budget, consider:

  • The scope of the Project When deciding on a budget amount, focus specifically on the budget needed to support the Project and its deliverables and not on supporting your broader business. For example, consider: How many people will be working on the Project? How many hours do you expect the Project (or the specific deliverables) to take? How fast can your team move? If you're a single developer, you just have to cover your own engineering time, which is much less than a full-fledged Organization with entire engineering teams. Your budget should reflect the hours of work spent to build the Project itself.

  • The impact of the Project Once it’s live, how big will the impact of the Project be? How many people will it affect? How much value does the Project bring to the Stellar/Soroban ecosystem?

When creating your deliverable roadmap, please consider:

  • Each deliverable must be closely related to the development of the Stellar / Soroban project;

  • Each deliverable must be something concrete a reviewer without any context can review (e.g. a smart contract, or an initial integration, etc.);

  • The roadmap should not be bloated and the number of hours and hourly rate should make sense for the scope of the deliverable and location of engineers.

  • The roadmap should not exceed 1-1.5 months of work for the Activation Award and 2-3 months for the Community Award (see difference in Award Structure).

  • As mentioned in the Submission Eligibility section, the technical specification architecture already needs to exist in the submission itself and should not be part of your deliverables. In other words, you should be ready to build once you receive the Award Amount.

  • For each deliverable, you can indent specifics, as well as:

    • a way to measure it's (successful) completion;

    • the estimated date of completion (counting the time it takes to complete from a week after the submission deadline);

    • the estimated amount of hours of work necessary for completion; and

    • a budget breakdown.

Please note that you can resubmit after getting an award to request additional funding if you need to, so you don't need to request as much funding from the get go. Please take a look at the Award Structure for more information.

What do we mean by ‘deliverables’?

“A deliverable is an element of output within the scope of a project. It is the result of objective-focused work completed within the project process. Often, project deliverables are dependent on another deliverable being completed first.

Project deliverables are often linked to objectives, but there is a clear difference between the two. A deliverable is an actual item created to advance a project, whereas an objective is an overall goal. So, if you wanted to gain more insights into your market base, that would be an objective. If you prepared a report to achieve this objective, that would be a deliverable.

Similarly, a deliverable is not to be confused with a milestone. A milestone is a specific marker or point in a project when you have achieved something significant. When a milestone is reached in a project, you simply transition to the next stage. With a deliverable, however, you have to submit the end result to an individual or team.” - Source: “What Is a Deliverable in Project Management?” on Wrike.com

Make sure your deliverables are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Others need to be able to measure the completion and/or success of completed deliverables.

Disclaimer

*To determine the number of XLM equal to the USD value of any Award, the USD valuation of XLM shall be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR), or, if such settlement price is unavailable or reasonably suspected by SDF to be unreliable, the settlement price as reported on a substantially similar and equally reputable cryptocurrency index provider as determined by the SDF in its discretion. The USD valuation of XLM for any particular Award shall be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price (or other agreed upon settlement price) reported on the day such Award is scheduled to be paid. The Participants acknowledge and understand that XLM is a highly risky and volatile asset, and that SDF does not provide any representations, warranties, or guarantees of its value.

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