TON Grants Program

Highlights

• TON Grants funds innovative undertakings, projects and developers working with TON technologies with the vision to expand the ecosystem: bring more use cases and sustainable projects.
• Program does not endorse the "spray and pray" method of awarding grants.
• The primary goal is to achieve self-sustainability for 70% of the projects that receive grants, enabling them to sustain their operations, particularly the functionalities for which the grant was provided, without relying on additional funding.
• Offers different funding tiers and developer support to meet the complexity of the area. Furthermore, tracking various KPIs, has a clear grant workflow, and a classification system for different types and classes of grants.
• Applications evaluated based on specific criteria with KPIs tracked by grantees to measure success and ease the operational load on the Grants team.
• Collaborates with other ecosystem funds to support innovation and provide a seamless pipeline for delivering viral success stories.

Principles

• Founded on principles of openness, transparency, and community collaboration.
• Focuses on delivering results tangible on the Ecosystem level
• To have clear language & communication about different types of grants
• Grant scope is not something set in stone and can be adjusted given the agreement of grantees and Grant committee

Mission

• Aims to drive growth and innovation in the TON ecosystem.
• Provides funding and technical and marketing support to grant recipients.

Goals

• Primary goal is for 70% of grant-receiving projects achieve self-sustainability, maintaining their operations without further funding and particularly supporting the grant-provided functionalities.

Guidelines

• Submit clear value proposition and milestones that benefit the TON ecosystem.
• Have a good understanding of TON architecture.
• Open-source code produced as part of the grant, apart from exceptional circumstances at the sole discretion of the grants committee.
• Engage with the community by answering questions on Questbook in a reasonable amount of time.
• Ideally have prior TON contest participation or experience building in the TON ecosystem, but is not mandatory.
• Projects that encourage gambling, illicit trade, money laundering, or criminal activities will not be considered.
• Closed-sourced projects or those not built natively on TON will not be considered, apart from exceptional circumstances at the sole discretion of the grants committee.
• Applicants must provide clear milestones, and teams should provide a specific value proposition to the TON ecosystem.
• Program does not endorse the "spray and pray" method of awarding grants.
• Examples of rejected grant proposals include requests for funding for marketing or non-code production related activities.

KPIs

• Tracks various KPIs to measure success of usage of the community funds spent on the grant including, but not limited to:
  • the total number of grant applications
  • grants approved and rejected each month
  • monthly cash flow of grants
  • usage metrics for products produced through developer tooling and consumer applications.
• KPIs to measure the amount of time taken by the Grant Committee to assess applications and make payments.
• TON Foundation publicly reports these KPIs monthly to ensure transparency and accountability to the community.

Taxonomy

• Clear taxonomy for Community Grants, T-Grants and Sponsorships.
• Enables effective distribution of funding and resources to different areas of the TON ecosystem.

Dev Support

• The TON Grants Program provides developer support to grant recipients.
• Feedback on proposals and milestones will be provided through Questbook.
• The program offers a dedicated Telegram channel (@tondev_eng) for technical discussions.
• The program encourages grant recipients to post on TON Overflow for long-form technical discussions.
• The TON Grants Program aims to build a collaborative community of developers and facilitate the growth and innovation of the TON ecosystem.
• Collaborates with other ecosystem funds to support innovation.

Funding Tiers

• The TON Grants Program offers different funding tiers for grants based on the project's size, scope, and the applicant's demographic.
• The program has three main funding tiers for grants: Lightning Grants (Tier 1), Standardized Grants (Tier 2), and Standardized Grants (Tier 3).
• The Lightning Grants are for individuals and small teams with a maximum grant amount of $5,000.
• The Standardized Grants (Tier 2) are for small and large teams with a maximum grant amount of up to $50,000.
• The Standardized Grants (Tier 3) are for large teams or teams with a proven track record on TON or other ecosystems.
• The grant milestones are allocated in increments of $5,000 or less.
• The TON Grants Program's funding tiers provide financial support to a diverse range of applicants, ensuring the grant program provides the necessary funding and resources to drive growth and innovation in the TON ecosystem.

Process

• The TON Grants Program has a straightforward application and review process.
• Applicants can apply through Questbook and applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
• The program has a clear review committee consisting of grants committee members, technical advisors, and operational advisors.
• As part of the grant approval process, the committee gathers feedback from relevant advisors and incorporates it into their decision-making process.
• Grant Scouts are individuals who identify and support potential grant applicants.
• The evaluation criteria vary depending on the type of grant, but they generally assess the project's strategic fit with TON, contribution to TON adoption, potential global market, and reputation of founders/project team.
• The committee evaluates grant applications based on specific evaluation criteria, including a preliminary screening, short-form scoring, and long-form scoring.
• After the evaluation, accepted grantees will be notified on Questbook and officially announced monthly on relevant TON Community and TON Society channels.
• The program also offers limited technical and marketing support to grant recipients to ensure their success

Payment

• Payment of grants will be paid out in Toncoin (TON)
• The Grant Committee may use the average 30-days rolling or spot
• The team will be informed proactively of the decision and payment