Budget Guidelines

SCF’s goal is to fund projects beneficial to the Stellar and Soroban ecosystems. When applying to an SCF Round, you select your own budget amount. While you will denominate that budget in USD, the final payouts will be in the equivalent amount of XLM*.

How Payments Work

When you apply for your Build Award, you’ll submit for a full budget of up to $150,000 in XLM*. However, your budget will be distributed to you in three equal tranches over your award timeline.

Tranche	Amount Distributed	Next Steps
Initial approval of submission	⅓ of total budget request (first payment)	MVP
Minimum Viable Product	⅓ of total budget request (second payment)	Testnet launch
Testnet	Access to Stellar LaunchKit (including credits for audits and infrastructure)	Mainnet Launch
Mainnet	1/3 of total budget request (final payment)	Grow your project

What SCF Awards are for:

• The budget should cover direct development costs of the project, with the final goal being mainnet launch.

• The scope of the work should ideally be no longer than 6 months. If for some reason the time to launch is longer than 6 months, please note this in the submission.

• Please do not include costs of security audits in your budget, as you will unlock access to apply credits from the SDF Audit Bank upon completion of testnet launch if your project meets the SDF Audit Bank Criteria.

• The SCF Build Award is not meant to cover costs associated with user acquisition, so focus your budget and deliverables on product/service development on Stellar and Soroban.

When sizing your budget, consider:

The scope of the project:

When deciding on a budget amount, focus specifically on the budget needed to support the Project and its deliverables and not on supporting your broader business. For example, consider: How many people will be working on the Project? How many hours do you expect the Project (or the specific deliverables) to take? How fast can your team move? If you're a single developer, you just have to cover your own engineering time, which is much less than a full-fledged Organization with entire engineering teams. Your budget should reflect the hours of work spent to build the Project itself.

The impact of the project:

Once it’s live, how big will the impact of the Project be? How many people will it affect? How much value does the Project bring to the Stellar/Soroban ecosystem?

When creating your deliverable roadmap, please consider:

• While you may define your own deliverables for your development journey, you should follow the general SCF Build Structure of “mvp → testnet → mainnet,” as those are the major tranches at which you will unlock funding and other support.

• The roadmap should not be bloated and the number of hours and hourly rate should make sense for the scope of the deliverable and location of engineers.

• The roadmap should not exceed 6 months of work for the SCF Build Award without reasonable explanation.

• As mentioned in the Submission Eligibility section, the technical specification architecture already needs to exist in the submission itself and should not be part of your deliverables. In other words, you should be ready to build once you receive the initial ⅓ of the SCF Build Award Amount.

Disclaimer

*To determine the number of XLM equal to the USD value of any Award, the USD valuation of XLM shall be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR), or, if such settlement price is unavailable or reasonably suspected by SDF to be unreliable, the settlement price as reported on a substantially similar and equally reputable cryptocurrency index provider as determined by the SDF in its discretion. The USD valuation of XLM for any particular Award shall be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price (or other agreed upon settlement price) reported on the day such Award is scheduled to be paid. The Participants acknowledge and understand that XLM is a highly risky and volatile asset, and that SDF does not provide any representations, warranties, or guarantees of its value.