Cardano Use Cases: Concept

Use cases deliver adoption and real world utility of Cardano to a global base of users and customers. Use cases can be in the nature of applications, products, and new services that lay the foundations for innovative business ideas to flourish on Cardano.

The Cardano Use Cases: Concept category is aimed towards projects seeking to develop early stage ideas that will deliver proof of concept, design research and basic prototyping for innovative Cardano-based products, services, and business models. 

It will help support proposers, especially new Catalyst entrants, get their idea off the ground and gain experience of working with product design processes. Your project must generate and test new ideas that bring utility to Cardano.

In all cases, projects must be prototyping the lowest level of fidelity or functionality necessary to get the research and design feedback required before making expensive and time consuming development activities. 

Your project must explore opportunities and ideas that first focus on making discoveries early in the product design process and produce specifications and a pathway that requires more significant technical development and feasibility testing. 

Submissions are encouraged from proposers of products or services that have not been previously funded by Catalyst. For example, if you have a brand new idea for a novel feature that is part of an existing product or service previously funded by Catalyst, please consider submitting into another category such as Cardano Use Cases: Solution, Cardano Use Cases: Product, or Cardano Open.

Funding Guidance:

100k ada is the maximum amount of funding a single proposal can request in Cardano Use Cases: Concept

Projects in this category do not need to be open source and may be proprietary, however in all cases the proposed technology concept must be for the benefit of the Cardano ecosystem. 

Proposals must be for brand new products that have not already been developed. New features to extend an existing product or service associated with the proposer(s) or their enterprise must be submitted in the Cardano Use Cases: Solution, Cardano Use Cases: Products or Cardano Open categories.

Areas of Interest:

• Disruptive innovation for industrial use cases using blockchain and smart contracts such as but not limited to applications for: alternative finance (Defi, RealFi), authenticated ownership and provenance, digital identity, Internet of Things, impact and social good, gaming and entertainment, manufacturing, marketplaces, oracles, supply chain and logistics, tokenization, zero-knowledge and privacy-preservation
• Blockchain research as it converges with other exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine-to-machine, next-generation distributed compute
• Projects and ventures porting from other ecosystems to deploy on Cardano or bridging to other ecosystems
• Projects which make use of Cardano-based scaling solutions such as Hydra or alternatives  

Eligibility:

The following are examples of proposals that will not be funded under the Cardano Use Cases: Concept category: 

• Proposals that focus on the final, finished project or product specification where the design and development is already advanced. For example, where the user or customer research focus of the proposed project will have little influence on the design. 
• Proposals that focus on adding new features or extending capabilities to existing products that are already deployed.