The Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building a more functional, accessible, and socially impactful Chainlink Network. In order to fuel the growth of the Chainlink community and accelerate the adoption of hybrid smart contracts, the Chainlink grant program continues to support work that makes it easier, faster, and more efficient to build, test, and interact with smart contract applications and decentralized oracle networks.

In pursuit of this goal, we actively support initiatives that help new smart contract developers join the ecosystem and assist existing developers in improving their workflow by providing education on how to best leverage Chainlink solutions in decentralized applications. General-purpose templates and implementation examples that developers can reference and build upon are critical for onboarding new developers and increasing the adoption of hybrid smart contracts.

For this reason, we are excited to announce that HackBG—a distributed ledger technology (DLT) development and consulting company—has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant for the creation of a set of templates, code samples, and guides that use real-world examples to illustrate how to securely automate key smart contract functions using Chainlink Automation. With this educational resource, developers will be able to learn best practices by following use case-specific walkthroughs, refer to development guides that describe the Chainlink architecture and implementation steps, and seamlessly explore smart contract automation use cases powered by Chainlink Automation through developing their own solutions.

Chainlink Automation is a decentralized smart contract automation solution that enables smart contract developers to automate key functions and DevOps tasks in a highly reliable, trust-minimized, and cost-efficient manner. The Chainlink Automation Network provides users with a decentralized network of nodes that are incentivized to perform all registered jobs, called “Upkeeps”, without competing with each other. Automation Upkeeps are general-purpose but must be created with a specific use case in mind. By reducing the complexity of the Automation developer experience, this educational resource will enable smart contract developers to quickly become familiar with and deploy Upkeeps.

As part of this grant, HackBG will build templates for common Chainlink Automation use cases, such as vault harvesting and settling game rounds. These templates will be hosted on an open-source GitHub repository so that they can easily be forked and deployed to Remix, enabling developers to build custom implementations of Chainlink Automation with only minor changes to the template. As a result, these resources will enable developers to easily experiment with custom Chainlink Automation integrations and learn best practices to reduce development costs and go-to-market time. By making the adoption of Chainlink Automation as easy as possible, this set of tools will ultimately contribute to a more seamless smart contract ecosystem onboarding process for developers.

HackBG is a blockchain development and consulting firm that provides a diverse set of services ranging from the development of blockchains and smart contracts to in-depth testing, system validation, and technical support. Backed by a team of industry experts, HackBG previously received a Chainlink grant for the creation of an end-to-end decentralized application demo for Chainlink oracle services. With its expertise proven through this previous work on an open-source tool for the Chainlink ecosystem, we believe HackBG is a suitable candidate to create this set of templates for demonstrating the wide-ranging smart contract automation capabilities of Chainlink Automation.

“We’re excited to be awarded a Chainlink Community Grant for the creation of a set of use case-specific templates and walkthroughs to support developers building with Chainlink Automation,” said HackBG CEO Milen Radkov. “As a development firm with extensive experience with blockchain technology, we look forward to creating more tools that help onboard the next generation of developers into the smart contract ecosystem and increase the adoption of Chainlink oracles.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower Chainlink ecosystem teams, developers, researchers, and social impact projects who are researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of hybrid smart contracts, secure oracle networks, and other impactful technologies that improve the world. We will continue supporting the community as a key driver of Chainlink’s rapid growth, because only together can we make hybrid smart contracts into the dominant form of digital agreement and build a world powered by cryptographic truth.

About the Chainlink Grant Program

If you want to learn more about the Grant Program, check out this 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.