F12: Cardano Use Cases: Concept

₳7,500,000 available

Proposals up to ₳100k

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: MVP, Cardano Use Cases: Product, or Cardano Open.

The expected outcome is validation of the concept or a working prototype by the end of the project.

Funding Guidance:

Applicants can submit a proposal for funding of up to ₳100k in Cardano Use Cases: Concept category. Proposals requesting larger amounts will be automatically archived.

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 ideas for industrial innovation using Cardano blockchain and smart contracts
• Identity, privacy, and zero knowledge applications and implementations
• Web3 integrations for gaming and entertainments
• Technical blockchain research converging with other exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine-to-machine, next-generation distributed compute
• Projects and ventures porting from or bridging other ecosystems to Cardano (eg wallet adding ADA or Cardano Native Token CNT support) 
• 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
• Proposals to develop content to information-only websites and blogs