The Starknet Foundation has announced a new grant initiative, allocating $5 million worth of USDC to support emerging projects on its network. The initiative, known as the $5 million Seed Grants Program, aims to aid at least 200 promising teams with $25,000 in USD Coin (USDC) per recipient. This funding is designed to provide a final push for projects in their last stages of development, assisting them in launching on Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution leveraging zero-knowledge rollup technology.
Addressing Development Challenges
Diego Oliva, the CEO of Starknet Foundation, explained that the $5 million seed grants program was developed in response to the primary challenges faced by current Starknet developers.
“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 emphasized that the initiative targets projects already possessing a minimum viable product (MVP) or proof-of-concept, with the overarching goal of nurturing further blockchain innovation.
“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.”
Growing Developer Interest and Exciting Use Cases
Starknet’s ecosystem has witnessed a notable influx of developers. Monthly developer figures surged to over 22,400 in December 2023, marking a remarkable 113% increase over the past three years from 10,500 in December 2020, according to Electric Capital’s 2023 Developer Report.
When discussing the most compelling projects and protocol categories building on Starknet, Oliva highlighted blockchain gaming as a leading use case. He said:
“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 revealed that blockchain gaming constitutes 35% of total decentralized application activity, with over 2.2 million daily unique active wallets.
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