Harmony Grants and Investments (Paused)
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Harmony Grants and Investments (Paused)

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Please note: Harmony Grants and Investments are currently paused and we will not be accepting any new applications until further notice. Read more.

Official Guidelines on how to apply for Grants and Investments at Harmony Foundation

Vision

Harmony Grants and Investments are looking to foster the “next billion-dollar startup” building across the blockchain ethos. We’re aiming for not just one startup, but at least 10 startups, for the rest of 2022. We are laser-focused on encouraging startups to come build on Harmony within these verticals: DeFi, Gaming, NFT, Metaverse and Tooling and have made significant changes to the grants program since the launch of our Ecosystem fund in 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, Metaverse or Tooling
  • Have 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
  • Funds can be released in tranches earmarked with milestones with scope and dates
  • Each of the milestones are set between 4-to-8 weeks
  • The first milestone should have:
  • Proposals could be non-monetary, seeking for co-marketing and/or technical support
  • Funding asks (⚠️) could range from $0 and up to $250K, either equity free or for liquidity
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Funding from grants are not meant to fully fund a startup. If you need additional funds beyond the ask, seek out external funds or self fund the initiative. This is a strong signal of your commitment to the proposed initiative and your 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

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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.

🏢 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.

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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 and mid-staged builders, 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 demonstrating user traction. 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 We believe the next million people that enter web3 will do so via fun games with low barriers to entry. Most of these games will be so user friendly, that many players won’t know that the underlying technology is even a blockchain. We also believe in teams that have a track record building successful Web2 desktop, browser and mobile games in the past will be able to navigate product and go-to-market risks.
  2. Sustainable NFT Communities We believe that NFTs are not just tradable digital assets, but they represent an underlying grass root movement; a cause. We look for proof of a stronghold of community that isn’t built overnight, or if it is, represent a movement that have multi-year staying power. We won’t pretend to be able to fathom the types of NFTs, but look for clues to signal a minimum 3-month track-record of strong followings of a 10,000+ fan base. NFT communities built in NFT hubs are more desirable, namely in cities such as New York, Singapore, London, Miami and Dubai.
  3. Conviction towards High Liquidity in DeFi We will be seeking to continuously invest in DeFi initiatives to power liquidity for builders on Harmony. We provide liquidity that are loss-less & time-bound — by helping bootstrap bridges, DEX pools, options vaults, insurance underwritings, stablecoins and market makers. We also see a need to invest in teams that can build solutions beyond these primitives that can boost confidence and volition, for the retail and institutional audiences, to bring over billions of dollars into Harmony’s DeFi ecosystem.
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During the evaluation of an investment, Harmony will likely pull in the Harmony Venture arm to help expand the strategic investment network for you.

📖 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.
  • We ask teams to open source, as Harmony is an open source and permission-less protocol. We look forward to seeing the unique and innovative products developers build on Harmony. To maintain transparency for all users, we require grantees to open source smart contract code.

Appendix

🔄Funding Proposal updates since Sep 2021🏉Harmony Ecosystem Group

References