Cardano Use Cases: Product

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: Product category is aimed towards projects and teams that are looking to enhance existing products, services, or innovative business propositions by significantly extending the features of pre-existing products that are already available in the market. 

Projects submitting to this category to add new capabilities to existing ventures and enterprises must show how their proposed solution leverages the Cardano blockchain. 

Submissions are encouraged from proposers of products or services that are already used in a production environment. 

Funding Guidance:

750k ada is the maximum amount of funding a single proposal can request in Cardano Use Cases: Product category.

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

As part of the application, applicants must include evidence of a working product. The working product must already be deployed on Cardano with clear utilization of the family of Cardano-based protocols, tools, and methods that is already used by the Cardano community, or which aims to achieve the above as part of the proposal.

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 in the Cardano Use Cases: Product category: 

• Proposals that do not, as part of the application process, provide sufficient evidence of an existing product or service
• Proposals that do not, as part of the application process provide sufficient evidence that the outcome of the proposal will leverage the Cardano blockchain
• Proposals that focus on brand new product or service ideas that have not yet been designed and developed at least to an MVP stage