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Harmony's Open Development
Harmony Grants v2 Guidelines (1)
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Harmony Grants v2 Guidelines (1)

By Jack Chan. To be approved by: @Li Jiang, @Daniel Pagan

Strong yes: @Giv Parvaneh, @Sam Harrison, @Peter Abilla, @Esther Arey, @Matty McDonald

On Hold: Stephen Tse

Goals

Harmony Grants and Investments are looking to foster the “next big thing” at Harmony. Not just one, but at least 10, within the next 6 months. We are now laser focused on building towards these verticals: DeFi, Gaming, NFT, Metaverse and Tooling. There are significant changes to the grants program since Sep 2021.

🚀 Grants

Grant Proposals can be submitted to Harmony via the official Talk forum.

Proposal Structure

These are the basics required to have a grant be considered

  • Description
    • up to 2,000 words describing the proposed dApp to launch on Harmony
    • screenshots of user experience demonstrating product-market fit
    • include a realistic go-to-market or launch plan, marked with timelines
    • integration plans with Harmony ecosystem builders, especially in DeFi
  • Ask
    • types of co-marketing campaigns,
    • types of technical support, and/or
    • amount in US Dollar equivalent
  • Relevant links (or its equivalent)
  • Team
    • description of all core team members supporting the initiative
    • include their experiences, background, % time commitment
    • LinkedIn profiles are encouraged, for doxxed core team members

Grant Specifications

Grants are recommended to have the following specifications:

  • must contribute into one of these verticals: DeFi, Games, NFTs or Developer Tools
  • a prototype of a fully-featured product launched on a Testnet on any chain
  • be able to demonstrate a proof-of-concept of the initiative
  • equity-free contributions earmarked with milestones with deliverable scope and dates
  • each of the milestones are set between 4-to-8 weeks
  • the first milestone should at least be launched on Mainnet
  • proposals could be non-monetary, seeking for co-marketing and/or technical support
  • funding* asks could range from $1K and up to $250K
⚠️
*Funding from grants are not meant to fully fund a project, if you need additional funds, seek out external funds or self fund the initiative, which is a strong signal of commitment and startup hustle.

Community Poll

In order to further strengthen funding proposals, we encourage the use of a community poll via on-chain voting on Snapshot, even if it’s an approved grant

⭐
Upon approval for a grant to build on Harmony, launching on Harmony with a founding team establishing a track record of executing well, will be good data points to enter into the Harmony Accelerator program. This program helps incubate founding teams with product development, fundraising, and talent recruitment.

Funding proposals approved by the Harmony Foundation may be retracted if the community signals strongly with a 67% majority to retract funding. Vice-versa, declined proposals will be reverted if the 2/3rds majority vote is in support of the proposal.

👉 Apply for a Grant

To apply, you’ll need to login to Harmony’s Forum and click on ➡️[+ New Topic]⬅️ over there

🏢 Investments

Think Startups. Better yet, think about building a Web3 startup with product market fit. We take investments seriously with a much higher bar and will give priority to teams that have already built and launched in Harmony’s ecosystem.

We have a Harmony Venture program where Harmony Foundation will co-invest into projects with check sizes of $50K to $1M, ideally for teams with modest valuations, to help teams gain an 18-to-36 month runway.

💡
At the moment, we do not wish to be lead investors. Your initiative must have an outside lead investor and we can match the funding terms.

Investment Theses

The foundation intends to seek out projects that are early staged or pre-product, at a Seed or Series A funding stage with a maximum post-money valuation of $25M or fully diluted valuation of under $50M. We are flexible in terms of investment instruments: tokens, NFTs, equity, or debts. We expect the teams behind the projects to have relevant background and expertise to their current initiatives, and have at least a minimal version of the working products with existing users. Teams will have an advantage if they are already actively involved with Harmony's social media, familiar with the culture of the community and are respected by the Harmony community.

The following are Harmony’s Investment theses

  1. Fun to Play Games Games are traditional built to be fun to play, to enjoy and to relax. Developers that build with primarily game-first in mind — with well-thought out game mechanics, sensible use of in-game digital goods, using Triple-A quality graphic renderings (even in the 8-bit world, Minecraft would be the industry standard) — and secondary priorities to include GameFi, tokenomics, marketplaces, etc. Teams that have built successful Web2 desktop, browser and mobile games in the past will be strong investment candidates
  2. Dense Community represented by NFTs NFTs generated to represent a cause, and with a stronghold of community, will be well sought after. NFTs could be created by creative artist in any digital medium — 2D/3D still images, animations, lighting, generative art, augmented reality, music, audio, etc. If there are no solid proofs of time-tested continuous followers of 10,000+ fans for over 3 months. Cross-overs from the physical to blockchain systems will require a very close inspection for potential gaps bridging from the analog to digital world
  3. DeFi protocols with a strong track record We will be seeking to continuously invest in DeFi initiatives that can help strengthen the network of DeFi primitives and build upon those, whether they are to provide loss-less liquidity to help bootstrap a liquidity for bridges, DEX pools, options vaults, insurance underwritings, collateralized stablecoins, etc. Teams that have successfully deployed, with combined cross-chain TVL of $20M+ (or volume traded of $5M+ per day) on Ethereum or at least 1 other EVM-compatible chain will be highly desirable

Once the Harmony Foundation invests in your startup venture, we help your team via the Harmony Accelerator Program where you will have support to hire talents via the Talent Network, find advisors via the Advisor Network, and web3 services via the Services Network.

👉 Apply for an Investment

To apply, you’ll need to login to Harmony’s Forum and click on ➡️[+ New Topic]⬅️ over there

📖 About Harmony Grants & Investments

Benefits of building on Harmony

Recommendations

  • Don’t be shy — post sneak peaks on Reddit, engage on Discord, mention @harmonyprotocol with #HarmonyONE on Twitter, post on the Harmony Talk forum, upload teasers on YouTube and reward Testnet users. These are successful playbooks to gain community enthusiasm.
  • Gain strong positive feedback from Harmony community members and DAOs prior to submitting a proposal — post the idea on Discord, Telegram, Reddit, Forum and mention #HarmonyONE and @harmonyprotocol on Twitter. Ideas are aplenty. Execution is key.
  • While awaiting for a reviewer response, post weekly updates on Harmony's forum by replying to your proposal’s original post. An engaging forum post is a strong signal of a high interest in the community and grant committee to agree on pre-approving grants.
  • Code bases, development materials and production assets associated with your proposal to be fully open, preferably with MIT or BSD licenses; All services and apps deployed must be easily cloneable.

Ask

  • We encourage teams, especially building cross chain bridged solutions, to go multi-chain quickly; otherwise we ask for 6-month exclusive campaign with Harmony — we can work with you to plan out time windows to work across chains.
  • We ask teams to use a 5-out-9 multisig account on Gnosis Safe to receive grant funds, aimed to have 3 signatories from the project team, 3 signatories from your project’s community, and 3 signatories from the Harmony community.
  • We ask teams to familiarize with Harmony’s ecosystem, sending funds to a team-managed wallet, converting half to 1USDC or 1USDT, to pair with ONEs, to loan & borrow, in Harmony’s Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) for 30-days. See DefiLlama for a list or this tutorial.
  • Write developer tutorial contents on docs.harmony.one’s Tutorial section, to help benefit the entire developer ecosystem; open a GitHub pull request (PR) here to start, and it will appear on the Developer Tutorial section of Harmony’s official documentation site.

Appendix

Updates since Sep 2021

Since the launch of Harmony’s Ecosystem Fund in Sep 2021, we have now simplified the program to two simple categories: “Grants” and “Investments”. “Grants” are equity-free with a fair amount of due diligence, while Investments are deeper relationships going through a more rigorous process. The category changes since the Ecosystem Fund’s inception include:

  • “Launch”, “Port” & “Partners”: are all grouped into “Grants”
  • “DAOs”: folds into Governance discussion in Harmony’s forum
  • “Hackathons”: Dora Hacks and Encode are two hackathon partners
  • “Bounties”: Gitcoin will be the main host for bounties
  • “Events”: Event Ops will manage this going forward with with Ambassador DAOs
  • “Income”: Program is superseded by the existing Contributors program

Funding FAQ

References