SCF#11 — Announcing the winners!
The 11th round of the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) has come to an end and we are excited to announce the winners! SCF#11 received 152 submissions, and 50 selected teams (a new record!) based in 34 unique countries* were put forward for community discussion and vote. In the end, 21 projects were awarded their requested budgets. The full list of winners is below, but first, here’s a bit about how this round went, and about what made it unique…
Startup Bootcamp
On November 1–4, 29 selected teams participated in the first-ever virtual startup bootcamp on the SCF Discord. The bootcamp adopted a self-serve Design Sprint Process created by DFS Lab where dedicated facilitators and technical mentors supported teams to define a problem, storyboard a solution, and develop a rapid prototype. To gamify the process, we tracked progress on a leaderboard, and anyone from the Stellar community could vote to award prizes for the teams’ output of the bootcamp activities.
The results were exciting! Participating teams reached an average 90% completion rate of bootcamp activities, and survey respondents (23 of 29 teams) rated the process an average of 4.7 out of 5 stars, which means they found the bootcamp helpful and would recommend the design sprint process to other teams.
Candidate Pitches
After the bootcamp, 47 of the 50 selected teams presented their projects live during the Candidate Pitches on November 8 & 9 on the SCF Discord. Each team had a few minutes to explain their solution on Stellar and demonstrate how it works, after which the community asked questions and provided feedback to improve their submissions.
Announcing the winners
After a few weeks of deliberation, a panel of 45 judges drawn from both the Stellar Development Foundation and the greater Stellar community and ecosystem voted to award 21 teams their requested budgets, and to give away a grand total of over 13M worth of XLM***.
Winners range from single developer projects to launch-ready businesses building the future of finance, and we’re excited to see what they do next! Without further ado, here are the winners ranked by highest vote:
1. Horizon-as-a-service — $2,500 worth of XLM**
Give teams building on Stellar, Customized and Private Horizon server access to the Stellar Network with only the data they need.
2. Flora — $47,500 worth of XLM**
Flora is a marketplace where users can access apps, integrations, transaction templates, and third-party Soroban Smart Contracts.
3. Stellarcarbon — $37,000 worth of XLM**
Stellarcarbon provides transparent nature-based carbon offsetting with proof of retirement on Stellar and in the Verra Registry.
4. SNNAC — Stellar NFT NFC ACcess — $7,500 worth of XLM**
SNNAC users engage in seamless transactions using Stellar Lumens, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) & Near Field Communications (NFC).
5. Spacewalk — $100,000 worth of XLM**
The first bridge to Polkadot: giving Stellar users more access to the DeFi world.
6. Elsa Wallet: Banking Filipinos — $95,000 worth of XLM**
A wallet for Filipinos to receive, spend and earn from their remittances — bringing them closer to their overseas loved ones.
7. Scam Flagging System — $10,000 worth of XLM**
Contributes to the open source StellarExpert directory to help protect users from questionable tokens and scam accounts.
8. sTeX — $17,000 worth of XLM**
A modern cloud LaTeX editor with google docs like UX and UI, and a built-in Stellar decentralized documents marketplace.
9. Paystreme — $50,000 worth of XLM**
A payment streaming platform that enables customers to pay in real time for services.
10. BravePay: New Era of payments — $200,000 worth of XLM**
BravePay makes cashless payments accessible to on and offline retailers, transforming any smartphone & website in a zero-fees POS
11. CashAbroad — $10,000 worth of XLM**
CashAbroad helps businesses do abroad payments as easy as with locals, with low-cost and instant transactions.
12. StellarPulse — $30,000 worth of XLM**
Track the development activity among different Stellar organizations on Github.
13. Kotani Pay — $100,000 worth of XLM**
Stablecoin payments without the need for an Internet connection or a bank account.
14. Chronospay — $65,000 worth of XLM**
A new low cost processing system to help businesses in South America.
15. Kata.Games — Sharing platform — $25,000 worth of XLM**
Hosts games to help players open up to new ideas and use cryptos/ Offers a tool that empowers game devs to create online & share
16. Mythforge — $15,000 worth of XLM**
A game utilizing XLM to provide players a way to immortalize their favorite in-game items.
17. Wirecash — $100,000 worth of XLM**
Wirecash offers virtual currency payments to suit all your needs, whether you’re a small or large company, or an individual.
18. Anchain — CISO/BEI Stellar integration — $195,000 worth of XLM**
AnChain.AI is offering to onboard the Stellar blockchain into its risk management products and open them up to the ecosystem.
19. StellarTipBot — $10,000 worth of XLM**
StellarTipBot will allow Telegram users in any Telegram group to tip or transfer XLM, Stellar tokens, or NFTs to other users.
20. Empowch — $25,000 worth of XLM**
Offering a mobile wallet to the unbanked in the MENA region by connecting them with family members abroad.
21. Zig3v2 — $2,500 worth of XLM**
Easy, Fast & Secure Stellar Biometric Account Creation, Storage and Signing wallet protocol.
Note from SDF’s ecosystem team
Big thanks to the judges and the Stellar community as a whole for evaluating, engaging with, and supporting these projects, and congratulations to the winners! We wish you all the very best, and look forward to watching your projects evolve and grow.
That said, there were a ton of great — really, really great — projects this round, and we wish we could have funded the lot. So, if you didn’t make the cut this time, don’t give up!
Submissions for the next iteration on SCF will open up early next year (get notified for dates + info!), so take what you’ve learned to do an even better job crafting your next application. Additionally, we may reach out to some candidates for follow up support.
*Teams were able to indicate multiple locations, and results do not discern the difference between ‘main team’, rest of team, and place of incorporation.
**The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on December 5, 2022 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
***Originally, we only intended to distribute 12M XLM, but we had more qualified submissions than ever, and we wanted to use the remaining 2022 budget to optimize for good outcomes and support more projects through the program. So we took the ~1.5M XLM leftover from SCF #10, added it to this round’s prize pool.
SCF#11 — Announcing the winners! was originally published in Stellar Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.