Starknet Foundation Launches $5M Grants Program

The Starknet Foundation has launched a $5 million Seed Grants Program to support new network projects on Starknet.

The Starknet Foundation has launched a new grant program that will award USDC worth $5 million to newly developed network projects.

Providing a “final push” to assist final-stage enterprises in launching on Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution based on zero-knowledge rollup technology, the new Seed Grants Program which is worth $5 million, intends to promote at least 200 promising teams.

Starknet Foundation $5M Grant Program

Each award recipient will get $25,000 in USD coins. Diego Oliva, the Chief Executive Officer of the Starknet Foundation, stated that the primary issues currently facing Starknet developers prompted the creation of the $5 million awards program.

“We’ve been listening carefully to devs [developers] and hearing about the main challenges they face. We are talking about people with amazing creativity and vision who need support with that ever-hard ‘last mile’ to get a project over the line and into production. So we responded with this program, which is intended, very directly and with minimal bureaucracy, to address this.”

“Oliva” Starknet-related projects that have already established a proof-of-concept or a minimal viable product (MVP) are eligible for the funding. The primary objective, as stated by Oliva, is to encourage further innovation in blockchain technology.

“In general, we want to reduce the barriers and burdens young teams face when considering starting a project. We’re trying to clear the path to innovation.”

Further, he stated that Starknet Foundation has been successful in luring a growing number of developers to its ecosystem. From 10,500 in December 2020, the total number of monthly developers increased to over 22,400 in December 2023, according to Electric Capital’s 2023 Developer Report.

This represents an increase of over 113% over the course of the previous three years. Oliva said that blockchain gaming continues to be one of the most prominent use cases when she was questioned about the most intriguing projects and protocol categories that are being built on Starknet.

“Starknet is leading the way in fully on-chain gaming. Key projects in this area include Realms, Influence and Dojo. This sector is growing fast, with more teams building on Starknet using the Dojo standard. Gaming is important not just for gamers but for everyone because it’s demanding on the network, testing its capabilities and demonstrating its power.”

He stated that blockchain gaming accounted for 35% of the entire activity of decentralized applications and that according to DappRadar data, there were over 2.2 million unique active wallets being used for gaming.