Singapore-based Zilliqa is launching a new grant program for teams and individual developers to build utilities and apps for its ecosystem. The Zilliqa blockchain technology is based on sharding. It aims to solve one of the key issues for the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies: blockchain bottlenecks and scalability.
The grant program is an effort to engage developers to create DApps for payments, finance, gaming, digital advertising, media and more.
Having launched the platform in 2017, Zilliqa’s team of engineers has had the benefit of being able to watch the crypto space grow and manage multiple challenges, including hacks, wallet freezes and security issues with existing smart contracts. Their solution is Scilla, a new, intermediate-level smart contract language that promises better performance by allowing developers to write and test secure smart contract applications more easily.
As an open-source technology platform, Zilliqa has the same challenge as other large blockchain projects that have launched their own mainnets, such as Tron and Eos. They have to offer incentives to developers who can build projects on their platform and transform it from a conceptual framework into a living platform for real-world use-cases.
Ethereum is currently the dominant blockchain network with over 1600 DApps.
“We have built a very strong community of technical people around Zilliqa,” says En Hui Ong, Head of Business Development with Zilliqa. “We would like to encourage our community and anyone else who is interested in our vision to contribute to our platform, which is open source and open for anyone to use for developing secure, high-throughput smart contract applications.”
The grant program pool is equivalent to $5 million and will be disbursed among selected participants and dispatched in three batches: initial payment, mid-term payment after certain milestones are reached, and the final payment after the project is completed. For each project, the code has to be open-source and maintained by the developer for at least one year.
The company is providing a list of suggested projects and DApps, but anyone can suggest an interesting idea. Applications are open starting today.