Submission Eligibility

Each Round will be open to all kinds of projects and companies building on Stellar and/or Soroban that are beneficial to the Stellar ecosystem and that further SDF's mission to create equitable access to the global financial system.

Important: Incoming submissions are reviewed in detail and only those that can check all the below requirements, and don’t fall under any ineligible category, will be considered for selection. Also, make sure that your submission has all the context a reviewer may need and doesn’t require any additional context: the panel does not take any other information into account other than what is mentioned on the submission.

Requirements checklist

• The submission and first deliverable need to be of high quality, clear in language, and rich in (technical) details;

• The Participant needs to clearly explain how Stellar and/or/Soroban is and will be integrated into the Project, as both a use case and technical integration (process maps are useful here), along with a:

  • well researched or tested concept;

  • minimum viable product (MVP); or

  • high-level architecture model.

• The Participant needs to clearly demonstrate knowledge of and experience with Stellar and/or Soroban and other relevant languages and technologies proposed in the project;

• The Participant needs to demonstrate to be ready to start building immediately after receiving an Award (e.g. needs to be able to dedicate developers experienced in the relevant languages to the project);

• The Project needs to demonstrate it is using or will use Stellar and/or Soroban to significantly improve its core features;

• If the Project intends to develop Stellar smart contracts (using the Soroban platform), the Project needs to clearly explain a plan to open-source these smart contracts.

• The requested budget needs to only cover costs related to the development of the project built on Stellar and/or Soroban, and be reasonable for its project scope, stage, and impact to the Stellar and Soroban ecosystem according to the SCF Award Budget Guidelines;

• All deliverables need to be clear with sufficient detail and planning and only focused on the development costs related to the project built on Stellar and/or Soroban;

• Participants need to demonstrate that their Project is unique and competitive, and show how it provides clear value to the Stellar ecosystem;

• While submission after receiving SCF Awards is allowed in accordance with the Resubmission Guidelines, SCF is not meant to sustain projects in the long term, so post-award submitting Participants will need to present a plan to acquire additional resources and funding, if necessary.

Ineligible Projects

Applicable law and our internal policies restrict us from providing lumens (“lumens” or “XLM”) awards to certain categories of Projects. Regardless of the selection panel or community voting outcome, a Project will be ineligible to receive an SCF Award if it:

• violates any applicable laws, regulations, orders, judgements or rules; infringes or violates any proprietary right of any party, including patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of privacy, right of publicity, or other rights;

• involves, facilitates, supports, or promotes unlawful activities, including, but not limited to: fraud, drug trafficking, purchases on dark web markets, theft, illegal arms trafficking, human trafficking, abduction, extortion, embezzlement, corruption of public officials, acts of terrorism or terrorist financing, and intellectual property violations;

• involves, facilitates, or promotes gambling;

• is offensive, deceptive, harmful, or libelous;

• is or contains sexually obscene content;

• is discriminatory or abusive toward any individual or group;

• contains, transmits, or instills malware or phishing pages or devices;

• is primarily focused on promoting a specific token or a specific NFT or NFT collection;

• or is primarily focused on use cases that do not contribute to the growth and development of Soroban, the Stellar network, ecosystem, and protocol (e.g., relying on Stellar for arbitrary data storage).

If your Project falls into any one of the above prohibited categories, it will not be eligible for an SCF Award. If you are unsure whether your Project falls into one or more of these categories, please contact us.

SDF reserves the right, in its absolute discretion, to disqualify any Participant or Project, without warning, from any SCF Round, and to ban them from future SCF Rounds, if they breach these Rules and Eligibility Guidelines (the “Official Rules”) or any applicable law, or otherwise act in a way that is inappropriate, not in the best interests or spirit of the SCF Round or otherwise in bad faith, including, without limitation, any direct or indirect tampering with or manipulation of the entry or voting process or abusive behavior towards other participants or submissions.

Important Note for generic Stellar use cases

Projects with a generic, Stellar only use case (such as simple wallet functionality and payments, etc.) need to have a live product already and provide verifiable proof of significant existing user traction.

Important Note for use cases that include any type of lending, automated market maker (AMM), savings, or yield products on Soroban

Projects with use cases that include any type of lending, AMM, savings, yield or similar products on Soroban can request SCF funding to create a proof of concept with a working prototype on the Futurenet, the Testnet, or another comparable developer sandbox environment.

Important Note for Issuers of Fiat-Backed Tokens: If your Project already issues or plans to issue a stablecoin or digital asset backed by fiat currency as a part of your SCF submission, you will need to complete a Stellar Info File, and as per the requirements in the Stellar documentation, it must include a URL to an attestation or other proof, evidence, or verification of sufficient reserves, such as a third-party audit.

Important Note for Recipients of other Funds, Grants, or Investments from SDF:

• Entities in which either the Matching Fund or Enterprise Fund have invested are not eligible to receive an SCF Award.

• Recipients of any currently outstanding Research & Development Grant and/or Academic Research Grant are not eligible to receive an SCF Award unless and until such recipient has submitted all required deliverables and fulfilled all obligations under their respective Grant Agreement(s).

• Recipients of any currently outstanding Marketing Grant, Currency Support Grant, and Ecosystem Infrastructure Grant, will not be eligible to receive an SCF Award for any project or deliverable that falls within the scope, whether directly or indirectly, of their respective Grant Agreement(s).

• Recipients of prior SCF Awards are permitted to resubmit the same or a new Project to a subsequent SCF Round, but they will be required to show that their previously awarded Project has achieved significant progress on the goals set forth in their previous submission (at SDF’s discretion).