Cardano Open: Developers

Update to challenge brief on Dec 13, 2023: Please note, that the total budget of this category changed. It was increased by 1,000,000 ada from the budget that was originally allocated to Catalyst Systems Improvements: Development and was archived as a whole. You can refer to this timestamped town hall segment and this reference slide deck for explanation.

Open source software, hardware and data solutions encourage greater transparency and security, and help reduce costs by developing, collaborating, and fixing in the open. More information on open source can be found here.  

Cardano Open: Developers (technical track) category aims to support developers and engineers to contribute to or develop open source technology centered around enabling and improving the Cardano developer experience. 

The goal of this category is to create developer-friendly tooling and approaches that streamline an integrated development environment, help to create code more efficiently and provide an ease of use for developers. 

In all cases, proposals in this category will be expected to select an open source license for their technology which as a minimum allows the community to copy, inspect, and alter the output of their project. 

Details of the selected open source license must be submitted by the applicants as part of their proposal. As part of their deliverables, projects will also be required to submit open source, high quality documentation for their technology that can be used as a learning resource by the rest of the community. 

Funding Guidance:

200k ada is the maximum amount of funding a single proposal can request in Cardano Open: Developers (technical) category.

Areas of interest:

Proposals may focus on open-source technical solutions that: 

• standardize, develop, support, or provide utilities for full stack solutions and integrated development environments, 
• create new libraries, SDKs, publicly available APIs, toolchains and frameworks. 

Eligibility Criteria:

The following are examples of proposals that will not be funded in the Cardano Open: Developers (technical) category: 

• Proposals that are not primarily seeking to develop new technology or contribute to or support existing open-source technology. For example, a learning resource guide to developing on Plutus, Marlowe, or other smart contracts platforms like Aiken should be part of the Cardano Open: Ecosystem (non-technical) category.
• Proposals that are not seeking to develop technology that is open-source and are in fact producing proprietary software or hardware.