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Academic Research Grants

The Stellar Development Foundation is soliciting proposals for scientific, technological, economic, and legal research advancing the foundation’s goals of financial inclusion, fast and inexpensive cross-border payments, efficient decentralized markets, and other beneficial applications of blockchain technology.

Awards will be provided to academic institutions as unrestricted gifts intended to support an individual with PI status. The funds are intended to support the cost of one graduate student or one post-doc for 12 months, plus reasonable expenses such as conference travel. To qualify, your institution must be a degree-granting institution whose primary mission is research or higher education, and your institution must be able to confirm that you are authorized to lead research (PI status). Students, consultants, for-profit businesses, and other institutions that do not grant degrees are not eligible. Awards are paid to academic institutions only and never to individuals. If you do not qualify, please take a look at the Stellar Community Fund instead.

Topics​

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Privacy-preserving technology, including improvements to both efficiency and regulatory compliance of private payments
  • Formal verification, including verification of smart contracts and distributed systems
  • Byzantine fault tolerant, Sybil-resistant, open peer-to-peer networks
  • Research related to the Federated Byzantine Agreement model
  • Market mechanisms for decentralized finance
  • Scalability solutions for order-books and smart-contracts, including deterministic parallel transaction execution
  • Legal theories and implications surrounding usage of distributed ledgers or decentralized exchanges for physical property and securities
  • Incentive design for improving financial responsibility, civic engagement, or other behaviors promoting financial security and democracy
  • Empirical studies of the Stellar network
  • Governance of distributed systems
  • Smart contracts languages

Proposals should propose to make novel scientific contributions, and activities such a literature reviews are not in scope (we expect PIs to be experts in the fields of the proposal).

Applying for a grant​

We review grant proposals quarterly. The submission deadlines are March 31, June 30, September 30, and December 31. There is a limit of maximum 2 submissions per calendar year.

Your proposal should be in PDF format, no longer than 3 pages, and in at least 11-point type, with the following outline:

  • Title
  • Abstract
  • One paragraph biography of principal investigator, including their current academic appointment and highlighting relevant research results and/or former students
  • Statement that the PI is authorized by their institution to submit research proposals and to lead research (i.e. they have PI status)
  • Technical proposal body
  • Budget not to exceed $150,000 (a rough historical average of funded proposals is $75,000)
  • When known, please name the student or post-doc interested in participating in the research.
  • Statement of intent not to patent the results, including a brief description of the principal investigator’s track record in patenting or not patenting research
  • Bibliography
  • If you previously received an award from SDF, add an extra page describing the work performed and the outcomes.
  • If this is a re-submission of a previously declined proposal, please explain briefly what changes you made.

To submit, please follow this link. If you have any questions, please e-mail [email protected]