SDF Academic Research Grants

Gifts of up to $150,000 to universities for a year of PI-led research on cryptography, consensus, verification and DeFi.

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Time left to apply

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Opened Oct 1Closes Dec 31

99% of the window left: 90 of 92 days.

Grant size: Up to $150K; Largest grant $150,000
Paid in: USD; Paid in one go
Funding model: Round; Fixed application window, reviewed as a batch.
Typical decision: 12 weeks; From submission to an answer

Checked Oct 1 against 3 sources. Confirm amounts and dates on research.stellar.org before you apply.

About the program

The Stellar Development Foundation funds academic research that advances financial inclusion, fast and cheap cross-border payments, efficient decentralized markets and other useful applications of blockchain technology. Awards go to the university as unrestricted gifts supporting a principal investigator.

Each award is meant to cover one graduate student or postdoc for 12 months, plus reasonable expenses such as conference travel. Budgets can be up to $150,000; SDF says the historical average is about $75,000. You must state that you do not intend to patent the results.

Recent grantees include researchers at Tel Aviv University, Aalto, UC Santa Cruz, NYU and UT Austin, working on SNARK security, threshold cryptography, oblivious primitives and verification of Stellar's consensus protocol.

What they fund

Privacy-preserving payments and zero-knowledge proofs
Formal verification of smart contracts and distributed systems
Byzantine fault tolerant and Sybil-resistant networks, including Federated Byzantine Agreement
Market mechanisms and scalability for decentralized finance
Legal, governance and empirical studies of the Stellar network

Who can apply

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Applicants must have principal investigator status at their institution
The institution must be degree-granting with research or higher education as its primary mission
Proposals must make novel scientific contributions; literature reviews are out of scope
At most two submissions per calendar year

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How applying works

Write a short proposal
Submit a PDF of at most 3 pages with abstract, PI bio, technical body, budget and a no-patent statement.
Submit by a deadline
Send it through the Airtable form by March 31, June 30, September 30 or December 31.
Quarterly review
SDF reviews all proposals received in the quarter together.
Gift to institution
Funded proposals are paid to the university as an unrestricted gift and listed on the grantees page.

Sources

Checked on Oct 1 against these pages. Programs change often, so confirm the details on research.stellar.org before you apply.

About the program

What they fund

Who can apply

How applying works

Write a short proposal

Submit by a deadline

Quarterly review

Gift to institution

Sources

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