Today, we’re excited to announce the finalists for the first ever Stellar Community Seed Fund!
The Seed Fund is an open-submission competition that awards lumen grants to help innovative businesses get started on Stellar. Unlike its sibling the Lab Fund, which serves as an entry point for exploration and discovery, the Seed Fund is designed to kickstart long-term, real-world, viable applications, utilities, and services. The awards are bigger, but since there’s more at stake, the barrier for entry is also higher, and there are fewer winners.
This round the competition was fierce! 58 great submissions! It was by far one of the best competitions we’ve seen in terms of the sheer number of high-quality entries. Picking the cream of the crop wasn’t easy but, after two months of deliberation, the panel of 20 judges — drawn from both the Stellar Development Foundation and the greater Stellar community — cast their votes, and narrowed the field to 8 finalists.
Here they are, in all their glory:
COINQVEST — Enterprise Payment Processing
COINQVEST helps online merchants and e-commerce shops programmatically accept and settle payments in digital currencies while staying compliant.
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Leaf Global Fintech — Banking Beyond the Branch
Leaf is a digital wallet that enables users to store, send and receive, and exchange in multiple stablecoins on their phones — no smartphone required.
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Litemint — Gaming Platform and NFT Marketplace
LITEMINT is a gaming platform connecting gamers to the crypto world.
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Task.io — Scaling Social Missions with Stellar
Task connects organisations with remote teams, tracks activity on the Stellar blockchain, processes payments between users, and allows the exchange of tokens for locally relevant rewards.
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Anclap — Anchor and Debit Card for Everyday Transactions
Anclap allows users to save up on digital currencies and to pay recurring daily expenses in a convenient way.
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OptionBlox & YieldBlox — DeFi Protocols for Financial Derivatives and Lending
OptionBlox and YieldBlox provide platforms and DeFi protocols for facilitating financial derivatives and lending.
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Mojoflower offers government issue share-ledgers and share-management tools for SMEs powered by Stellar.
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Blocknify
Blocknify allows users to easily add a legally binding e-signature to any Stellar transaction with privacy and trust built-in.
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Massive congratulations to all the finalists for their hard work and dedication to quality and viability! We’ll be talking more about each project over the coming weeks.
How did we end up with 8 finalists?
If you check out the Seed Fund page, you may notice that the nomination panel is tasked with choosing 3–5 finalists. In this round, there was a 4-way tie for 5th place, and, after a series of discussions, the panel decided to extend the awards rather than trying to break the tie. The overall quality of the projects was really high this round — it was already hard enough to narrow the field given the overall strength of entries — and the consensus was that it made sense to spread the love a little, and that it was possible to do so while still honoring the spirit and structure of the competition.
What happens next?
Community discussion
Now that the nomination round is over, it’s time for the community discussion phase! Above, you’ll find a link to each finalist’s submission, along with a link to a channel where you can ask questions, make suggestions, and provide feedback. Between now and April 26, we encourage you to get in there and let your voice be heard! The more feedback you give, the better these projects will be.
As part of SDF’s partnership with MouseBelt Labs, a blockchain accelerator and ecosystem of services supporting students and startups in the blockchain industry, all finalists are also automatically admitted to Mousebelt’s Startup School. Startup School mentors can provide exclusive advising to finalists to help them with anything product-, design-, or business-related. The school also provides an opportunity to connect with other startup founders in the Mousebelt network to build lasting connections that may help you down the road. If you’re a finalist, we’ll reach out to you with details.
Final voting and awards
Once the community discussion ends, there’s a final vote to determine how to split the award allocation, which lasts until May 10. Every finalist wins lumens; this vote just determines how many each project will win.
This time, rather than opening that vote up to anyone with a computer, we’re limiting it to members of the scf_panel Keybase group, a group that consists of verified members of the Stellar ecosystem. At the moment, that group is selected based on past participation and presence in various community channels. In future rounds we plan to formalize and improve the process.
We suggested introducing qualified voting based on what we learned from the Lab Fund, and decided to implement it based on feedback from this round’s panel and participants. The general sentiment was that it made sense to prioritize informed votes based on diligence and research, and the hope is that doing so prevents contestants from gaming the system…or feeling forced to compete with those who are. It feels like a fair way to reward projects based on merit rather than popularity.
Even if you’re not in the scf_panel group yet, your voice is still important! By joining the discussions, leaving comments and feedback, and rooting for your favorite projects, you can give the panel valuable insight that will help them decide how to vote.
Finally congratulations again to the finalists. We wish you all the very best both in this competition and in your next year ahead.
Announcing Stellar Community Seed Fund №1 Finalists was originally published in Stellar Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.