NEAR Ecosystem Fund

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The NEAR Foundation was created in 2019 to help steward and develop the ecosystem that would start to form. NEAR’s founder Illia Polosukhin announced their ecosystem fund at their conference (NEARCON) back in October of 2021 to the tune of $800M in total incentives available to anons that want to help build out the ecosystem.

Aside from the NEAR Foundation there are also funds available through these sources all with additional details on the site mentioned above. I wasn’t able to find any details or lists of projects or initiatives funded through these entities that were directly tied to NEAR. It should also be noted that prior to the $800M ecosystem fund announcement, NEAR had already spent $45M across more than 120 projects, including Core Protocol Infrastructure Grants.

  • NEAR Community Fund
  • Open Web Collective Fund
  • NEAR Asia Fund
  • Cypherpunk Guild
  • DAO Ecosystem

Overview

Launch Date: 10/26/2021

Total Funding Allocated: $800M

Total Funds Distributed to Date (if available): As of 5/13/2022 $45M+ in incentives have been paid out. You can view the latest totals on their website here

What Asset(s) are the funds paid out with (native token versus $USD, for example): The incentives for these programs are paid out in $NEAR, but accounted for on a $USD cost basis, meaning recipients would be granted an amount equivalent to $NEAR based on current market price at time of allocation.

Where funding is tracked: You can track the current submissions on their Notion page. There is work being done to provide more transparency to this program in the days ahead.

Area(s) of Focus

If you take a look around on NEAR’s wiki you can find some details on the grants program. At a high level it states these three main objectives:

  • Provide funding to accelerate the growth of the NEAR ecosystem and broader community
  • Support the development of necessary and value add infrastructure / tooling to support continued innovation
  • Attract and reward a diverse set of open source driven projects and developers that build on NEAR

The program is structured to allow for funding across these four main categories:

  • Open Source & Public Goods (yay!!)
  • Startups
  • Education Initiatives
  • Bounty Awarding Initiatives

Governance

The current process for fund governance is driven by NEAR Foundation and explained to me to have a due diligence and evaluation process prior to allocation. Funds are distributed on a milestone basis once agreed upon goals for project success are met or progressed.  The success criteria for each of these differs between the projects and would be at the discretion of decision makers at NEAR Foundation to define and ensure alignment to overall ecosystem goals and objectives.

The address where it was indicated to me that these funds are paid from is located below:

https://explorer.near.org/accounts/nf-payments.near

How to Apply

If you might be interested in applying you can hit this link for more details.  If questions arise during that process make sure to check out the Discord and they can help.

  • Open Source & Public Goods (yay!!)
  • Startups
  • Education Initiatives
  • Bounty Awarding Initiatives

Announcements, forum posts, news articles or other media that may be relevant

Twitter Announcement

https://wiki.near.org/ecosystem/grants-and-funding

Projects Granted by NEAR/Aurora

https://explorer.near.org/accounts/nf-payments.near

NEAR Ecosystem Fund Review by Sovereign Signal