The Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building a more functional and accessible Chainlink Network. This includes the creation of critical developer tooling, integration of new blockchains, addition of more high-quality data, and launching of key services around the Chainlink Network, with key academic research to support those developments. We encourage talented individual developers and development teams to apply to the grant program here, or if you are a researcher and want to collaborate, contact us.

We are excited to announce that we are expanding upon those initial objectives by launching a new category of grants focused on creating social impact through the usage of universally connected smart contracts. We are now accepting requests for proposals from talented startups, non-governmental organizations, and non-profits looking to build and apply universally connected smart contracts in a manner that improves the lives of everyday citizens and local communities around the world.

As a leader and pioneer in the blockchain space, we understand that our mission goes beyond building the most secure and reliable oracle network to support the smart contract ecosystem. We must also push the developers, projects, and organizations towards causes that apply universally connected smart contacts in an openly accessible and equitable manner.

Chainlink’s explicit goal is to “Create an Economically Fair World;” it’s why we are committed to using the Chainlink grant program to empower those teams and organizations striving towards unlocking the highest potential of blockchain, smart contract, and oracle technology to the betterment of humanity. This means enabling a cryptographically enforced system of contracts that take both our daily lives and emerging markets into a new age of economic fairness, driven less by vague brand promises and more by the value that institutions and individuals actually provide.

The new initiative comes on the heels of numerous social impact programs already funded by the Chainlink Grant Program, including support for UNESCO in accelerating blockchain education and development around the world and work with ACRE Africa and Etherisc around bringing crop insurance to over 250,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya to offset the effects of climate change.

Some of the types of social impact grants we’re considering include:

• Initiatives that bring universally connected smart contracts into emerging markets. Specifically, those that take an emerging market from 0 to 1 in terms of having a critical piece of contractual, financial, or societal infrastructure previously not available (e.g., crop insurance).
• Global initiatives financed by NGOs and government agencies that reduce systemic financial risk through the application of blockchains, smart contracts, and oracles.
• Non-profit work geared towards investment in blockchain-enabled projects that provide people and communities around the world with tools to directly improve their quality of life.

We’re excited to recognize this new category of grants, specifically dedicated to providing financial support and incentives to developers wanting to use smart contracts and real-world data to build more economically fair and mathematically guaranteed social and financial systems. In the same way the Internet gave society unprecedented access to information right at our fingertips, universally connected smart contracts provide society with new financial primitives to greatly improve how we access, monetize, and exchange value. It’s now up to us to unlock it to the benefit of humanity.

About the Chainlink Grant Program

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower more and more Chainlink ecosystem teams, researchers, and social impact projects who are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of universally connected smart contracts, secure oracle networks, and impactful technology that improves the world. We will continue supporting the community as a key driver of Chainlink’s rapid growth, because only together can we make universally connected smart contracts into the dominant form of digital agreement.

If you want to learn more about the Grant Program, check out our recent blog post that further expands upon its goals and the criteria for submission. If you would like to participate in the Chainlink Grant Program, please apply here. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in Cash and/or LINK.