Web3 Foundation Grants — Wave 16 Recipients

Published in

Web3 Foundation

4 min readJan 9, 2023

As 2022 comes to a close, the Web3 Foundation celebrates four years of grant-giving. In the first year, over 60 grants were awarded through the General Grants Program. The following year, the Open Grants Program was introduced, and the number of grants more than doubled, totaling 147. In 2021, an additional 123 grants were signed. And now, in 2022, we are pleased to announce that a total of 150 grants were signed — more than in any year before! In addition to that, 267 grant applications were received, and 230 grant milestones were delivered.

In 2022, the Web3 Foundation’s grant program reached two major milestones: receiving its 1000th grant application and supporting its 400th project. It comes as no surprise that Polkadot development saw an all-time high in 2022, with a peak of nearly 2500 monthly active developers. This made Polkadot one of the most active developer communities outside of Ethereum throughout the year. In order for the grants program to further continue to support and empower the growing developer community, we launched a web-based UI that allows readers to get more familiar with the grants program and explore all signed grants, completed waves, RFPs, and other docs in a more user-friendly manner.

We’re delighted to see the number of talented teams contributing to the Polkadot, Kusama, and Substrate tech stack grow and we’re continuously looking for new projects to support in order to continue the expansion of the Web 3.0 ecosystem. If you’re interested, we invite you to apply or reach out to us as explained below.

Recipients 🚀

We maintain a list of all accepted applications on our grants repository here. Below are all the 39 grant recipients of Wave 16.

📱 User Interface

✒️ Signatures

Jett Hays: Distributed Key Management

🔗 Chains and Pallets

🔧 Tools, APIs and Languages

🧪 Research

💰 Wallets

Coong Team: Coong Wallet

Apply Now!

As a year full of excitement comes to an end, we are looking forward to the possibilities that 2023 holds, including a further increase in the number of grant applications and deliveries. If you are interested in receiving a W3F grant, please reach out! Applying for a grant is as simple as submitting a pull request to our grants program repository. For inspiration, an overview of projects in the ecosystem, and broad project ideas we’re interested in funding, you can take a look at our open-source tech stack. The best way to get your proposal accepted is to outline a detailed roadmap. Going over our guidelines, as well as the application template, will give you a general idea of what we look for in a grant application.

For more information on how to apply and tips on putting together a great application, check out the README and FAQs in our grants program repository on GitHub. We look forward to receiving your application!

Work with us!

The grants program aims to be as open and accessible as possible. If you are interested in contributing or getting involved, there are several ways you can do that:

We are open to milestone evaluations from third parties. If you are particularly interested in a certain project, or particularly knowledgeable on a relevant subject, submit your own evaluation.
We encourage anyone to submit a request for proposals (RFPs). If you find that there is something missing in our ecosystem (a tool, a project, infrastructure, etc.), that we could help fund, please submit an RFP.
Join us! We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer and a Technical Educator to join us full-time. Check out all our current job openings and apply!

We strive to continue improving our grants program and are always open to feedback. If you would like to share any suggestions or criticism, please reach out to us on Github or Element!