Introducing the Akash Developer Grant Program

We are excited to announce the launch of the Akash Developer Grant, a community-driven fund that supports promising developers and teams. The purpose of this program is to expand the developer community, encourage collaboration among developers, and develop open source projects to facilitate further adoption of the decentralized cloud of the Akash network.

Inspired by startup programs like AWS Activate and YC, the Developer Grants program provides funding, mentorship, support, and marketing to people including developers:

• Grants: Developers can apply for Grants ranging from $100 to $100,000, paid in $AKT.

• Office Hours: Guidance and best practice support for building and testing by the Akash community and core development team during office hours

• Collaboration: Every funded project is open source and has its own channel on Discord to communicate with users in the Akash community at any time.

• Powered by Akash: Outstanding projects will be exposed on our forums and website to gain more attention.

• Demo Day: Top developers will present their projects to investors, advisors, and other developers in the Akash community via blogs and Akash-branded live broadcasts.

How to qualify for Grants

All software development engineers who have an account on Github are eligible to apply for Grant.

What can I use $AKT tokens for?

You can spend funds on infrastructure on the Akash network:

• Deploy container-based applications managed with Kubernetes

• Host applications on the Akash open source cloud platform

• Build web applications or API backend applications on top of a robust infrastructure.

• Apply for up to $100,000 in the Community Fund Pool

• Safely rent out your data center as a provider

How can I get help from Akash?

• Get Started Guides: Our guides and tutorials are written by the community to help you quickly start deploying on Akash.

• Technical support: Technical support for all developers is free, no matter how much money you spend on AKT, mortgage AKT, or how much AKT you own.

• Ask us any questions: Got a question about Akash? Join the discussion in our active community forum.

level of financial support

The Developer Grant Program has a wide range of award tiers, from $100 to $100,000. The amount of funds received depends on the milestones achieved and the funding tiers unlocked.

First, the program has four award levels to support all types of projects large and small.

• $100 Startup Funding: The purpose of this funding is to support a large number of developers running their first applications on Akash. If developers send these tokens to exchanges, they will not be eligible for future funding, and the next tier of funding.

• 1,$000 Seed Funding: Seed Funding asks developers to create a detailed proposal for their project and share it with the community for public comments and questions. Developers open source their projects to the community, publish detailed guides, and answer community questions.

• 10,$1,000 Incubator Fund: Incubator funds are awarded only as developers make progress meeting the milestones in their proposal. Developers may be asked to present their projects during recorded live broadcasts and answer live questions from the community.

• $100,000 Accelerator Fund: Accelerator funds are awarded only to developers who have consistently hit their milestones, actively improved, and shown a willingness to remain open source and collaborate with the Akash community.

milestone

milestone

Milestones for each project will be identified as part of the grant application. A milestone is a goal, for example, development of a feature, release of a working beta, and completion of work. A typical project should have 3-4 milestones and be completed within 2-4 months. Projects that complete their milestones will be showcased to investors, advisors, and developers from the community at scheduled demo days.

What types of projects will receive grant opportunities?

We are committed to having a transparent and clear process, and we want to set expectations for the types of projects that are considered for funding.

Projects applying for Developer Program grants will need to outline how their project will contribute and add value to the Akash ecosystem.

Here are some examples of projects we would like to see submitted:

• Akash's developer tools, including SDK and API

• Open source developer tools (Homebrew)

• Creator Platforms (CMS, Podcasts, Blogs, Forums, GitLab)

• Decentralized web services (Handshake, DNS, OpenRegistry)

• Backend as a Service (Hasura on Akash)

• Platform as a Service (Heroku on Akash)

• Open source communication (chat, email)

• Desktop deployment interface

• Hosted deployment interface with wallet integration

• App store interface (OpenChannel on Akash)

• Persistent Storage Integration (Sia, Skynet, Filecoin, Storj, Arweave, Coldstack)

How to choose projects?

Proposals will be reviewed by the Community Bounty Board (CAB).

Every month, the committee will meet to review proposals submitted by developers and produce on-chain proposals for community voting. Meetings will be publicly announced and hosted online via Google Meet or Zoom. All meetings will be recorded and minutes will be shared publicly with the community.

CAB is open to Akash clients, validators, suppliers, investors, advisors, employees and ex-employees. If you would like to nominate someone, please post your nomination publicly on the grant application in the community forum.

Being a member of this committee requires active participation in the review of developer applications and participation in the decision-making and recommendation writing process. Early voting requires attendance.

Referrer Rewards

One of the main goals of the Developer Grants program is to attract talented developers from around the world. If you would like to invite a developer to join the Akash Developer Program, please create an invite and share it with your social networks. Each month, the community members who successfully invite the most will receive Grants of $100 or $1,000.

Incubators, accelerators and venture capital firms, oh my!

Akash will partner with other startup funds to provide free hosting on Akash. If you are a VC, accelerator, incubator, or other startup interested in providing Akash developer funding for your startup, please contact partners@akash.network and our partnerships team will get in touch.

How will this funding be raised?

To rapidly scale up the project, initial grants will be awarded by the Akashic Treasury.

We are currently supporting developers through five programming challenges. Over the past 3 months, Akash Finance has awarded over $7,000 in AKT to over 80 developers. Seven developers were winners of the Solana Hackathon, while 37 developers received $100 in AKT as part of the Sovrython Hackathon.

Grants over $1,000 will be proposed by CAB to take advantage of the community pool. CAB will work with developers to create proposals to fund projects and encourage community votes.

As of this writing, the community pool is over one million tokens at 1,006,408 AKT. The CAB could propose awarding these grants directly to developers to reduce complexity - or - propose awarding grants to multi-signature wallets, managed by community members.

How to Apply for Developer Grants

The process is simple. Follow the 10 steps detailed on the Akash Community Forum to install Akash, create an account, propose your project and apply.

Akash public account: akashdecloud