We're offering grants for developing open source blockchain libraries in Elixir

Phoenix Forum Chat / Discussions
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Hi all,

I’ve been a proud member for the Elixir/Phoenix community since 2018 when I first saw Chris McCord’s demo of Live View. I was blown away by what was possible with just a few lines of code (and without writing js). Elixir further excited me because I spent many years in the Ruby community before and was impressed by the great work and contributions Jose Valim made in Ruby. I saw many smart people moving from the Ruby world over to Elixir, and it made a lot of sense why.

After spending close to a thousand hours going deeper and developing on Elixir and Phoenix, it’s my top choice for developing interactive apps that need concurrency or leverage websockets. I love the speed, dead-simple concurrency, and fault tolerance that you get, basically for free (microsecond FTW).

This year I got involved in a blockchain community called Stacks which enables dApps and smart contracts built on top of Bitcoin. I’m running the community’s accelerator program and work closely with the Stacks Foundation which is a non-profit offering grants for open source development related to Stacks.

Since I love building apps in Elixir and have interacted with so many talented people in this community, I’d love to see more integrations between Elixir and Stacks. I chose to work with Stacks because the developers contributing to projects are strong and remind me a lot of the Elixir community. I’m sold on the future of Elixir and the future of dApps with Stacks, so my dream scenario as a developer is to see more crossover in these communities.

If anyone’s interested in blockchain and getting funded to contribute to open source with Elixir, let me know. Or if you’re already building an open source Elixir library to work with other blockchains and can integrate Stacks, that would also be awesome. I’d be happy to answer any questions about Stacks and give feedback on ideas, as well as make intros to the Stacks Foundation to act as a champion for any Elixir-based projects.

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Hello all,

I got a couple of messages with questions so wanted to mention that the way the grants work is that you come up with an idea for a project then submit it as a grant proposal with specific milestones. The Stacks Foundation will provide some funding upfront and then the rest based on your milestones. You don’t need to be working on it full-time. If anyone has more questions, shoot me a message or comment here!

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This is great, Trevor :smiley:

Could you share some details on the type of grants or amounts people are likely to get? Perhaps knowing what might be available could grab more people’s attention :blush:

(I edited the thread title slightly btw, if you think it’s not clear enough let me know and we can alter it.)

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Absolutely, you can learn more about the grants here: Grants | Stacks Foundation

All of the grant proposals are posted on GitHub with amounts (click on the Issues page)

It’s a milestone based funding approach, where funding is unlocked from different deliverables. We’re seeing grants up to $100k right now, where usually it would be broken down into 3 or more milestones with the first milestone funded upfront. $100k is fairly rare though, and many of the grants are less than $30k. IMO, enabling more Elixir apps to be built on Stacks blockchain is very compelling (maybe I’m biased as an Elixir dev myself). It all depends on the potential open source value to what you’re building and how helpful it will be to other developers. If you’re interested, send me a ping. The process is very relationship based, so I can help guide anyone and help you vett your ideas to save time. The Foundation will look at the background of the person applying, and also what is the motivation to build something you’re building.

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