Project Wishlist

Take a close look at the specific ecosystem goals, needs, and eligibility criteria for each project category below prior to submission, which is reviewed and updated quarterly by SCF verified members. Last updated July 9, 2025.

Category Specific Submission Criteria

(End-User) Applications

This category is for applications focused on end-users, such as wallets, marketplaces, and more.

Ecosystem Goals:

• Encourage end-user applications with targeted (new-to-crypto) audiences and simplified user experiences to drive greater adoption.

• Support projects that make decentralized financial services accessible to a broader audience while increasing network usage, TVL, and value to the network.

• Create applications that balance on-chain and off-chain storage to optimize their end-user experience, while minimizing ledger bloat.

• Create applications that hide the complexity of blockchain, removing barriers for non-native crypto users. These applications should be approachable and encourage widespread use.

• Support more multichain wallets that integrate popular Stellar DeFi protocols such as Blend, Aquarius, Blend, DeFindex, Soroswap, etc. to bring more users to Stellar.

Specific Needs:

• User-friendly front-end interfaces that seamlessly integrate Stellar.

• Micropayment apps that solve for a specific, real, sustainable use case.

• User interfaces that help users access yield from existing DeFi lending and trading protocols by automating strategies, managing risk, and protecting the user’s principle at all times.

• Projects that target an APAC audience, helping to solve cross-border payments and access to low-risk investments abroad.

• Apps that enhance the transparency and the effectiveness of International Aid delivery.

• Projects that bridge Stellar to other ecosystems; such as muti crypto wallets, payment apps for multiple networks, etc.

• Projects that focus on using the stellar disbursement platform or their custom take on this tool.

• Projects that can bring more end users and developers to the network, and introduce Stellar DeFi Protocols to their users directly in the app.

Eligibility Criteria:

• Team should provide sufficient evidence of use-case validation. This may include:

  • (Significant) user traction;

  • User interviews/customer discovery;

  • Target market and competition analysis;

  • Appropriate demoing to target users.

• Traction should be easily verifiable.

• If the project exists on other chains, provide detailed metrics (e.g., users, volume, transactions).

• Focus on a strong UI, well-defined target audience, and user journey.

• Measure impact with clear KPIs that align with increasing Stellar usage (e.g., app downloads → usage → deposits on Stellar).

• Clearly articulate the GTM plan.

• Include details on founders past experience; no undisclosed teams.

• The team should prove they understand exactly why their product needs to be on Stellar, explain why Stellar is crucial to the problem they are solving, and justify why they can’t simply do it without it.

• Check that your submission includes:

  • A clear technical plan on how you’ll build the Stellar/Soroban integration;

  • Deliverables that are detailed, achievable, and have verifiable completion criteria;

  • A budget that is specified per deliverable and that fully adheres to the budget guidelines;

  • A convincing demonstration of your team readiness to build and launch your project.

  • A plan for sustainability - how will your project fund itself once grant funding runs out?

Financial Protocols

This category is for financial protocols such as AMMs, DEXes, Collateralized Stablecoins, and more.

Ecosystem Goals:

• Increase Total Value Locked & Total Value Exchanged on Stellar

• Increase number of meaningful and productive TXs on network

• Increase the opportunities for users to put assets to work on the network in decentralized and trustless protocols, earning yield or other revenues for their participation.

• Increase overall capital efficiency of the network, enabling narrower spreads, lower costs and returns to users of the Stellar network and its ecosystem.

Specific Needs

• Projects which build on or compose with existing ecosystem protocols, like Blend or FxDao or Aquarius to offer new and novel capabilities to the network.

• Protocols that enable synthetic assets—whether currencies, commodities, or other digital assets—to be usable and composable on Stellar.

• Derivatives and options infrastructure built for other protocols and developers, not retail trading.

• Yield strategies and automation tools that help apps and strategy operators scale and monetize sustainably.

• Decentralized financial infrastructure like escrows, insurance, and credit scoring for efficient, trustless markets—both on-chain and in the real world.

Eligibility Criteria

• All projects should include detailed milestones and a convincing technical architecture.

• Projects should include diagrams that outline the proposed contract architecture and funds flows so that reviewers can visualize how your protocol is designed to work.

• Team should provide evidence of use-case validation. This may include:

  • Market research done on the model;

  • Usecase contextualized within the Stellar Ecosystem specifically;

  • User research;

  • Explain how the model has been successful in other ecosystems.

• Projects should demonstrate a solid understanding of the Stellar ecosystem and existing tools and protocols.

  • Don’t rebuild what already exists—reuse and composability are encouraged.

  • If you are building something similar to an existing project, explain what gap you're addressing or how your version pushes the ecosystem forward.

• Projects should have a thoughtful monetization or sustainability model.

  • This doesn’t need to be finalized, but you should show you’ve considered:

    • What value you're creating for users.

    • How your project captures a share of that value.

    • How you’ll incentivize adoption, integrations, or ongoing support from other ecosystem participants.

• Projects are free to take inspiration from those building in other ecosystems, but you should always cite your sources.

Infrastructure & Services

This category includes Security, Data, RPCs, Oracles, Indexers, Anchors, and Custodial Services.

Ecosystem Goals:

• Provide essential tools and platforms to optimize development, deployment, operations, and monitoring processes, enhancing builders' productivity while reducing their production costs.

Specific Needs

• Provide reliable anchor services to enhance the connectivity between the Stellar network and local currencies. Anchors should comply with local regulatory requirements.

• Securely bridge major crypto assets (e.g., BTC, ETH, stablecoins) through transparent custodial or semi-custodial models with verifiable proof of reserves.

• Leverage existing Stellar-native infrastructure projects (data indexing is a clear example) for newcomers building new products/services

Eligibility Criteria:

• Evidence of use-case validation. This may look like:

  • Existing user traction

  • Experience in the Stellar Ecosystem

• Outline channels for user feedback, bug reporting, feature requests, and foster transparency through open-source repositories and community forums.

• Conduct due diligence/competitive analysis on existing projects and clearly demonstrate unique value and advantages.

• Infrastructure proposals must include maintenance commitments, service duration guarantees, SLAs, and sustainability plans for ecosystem stability.

• A prototype or MVP is highly recommended over a proposal with a roadmap with no demo.

Developer Tooling

This category is for developer tooling and resources including IDEs, reusable contract building blocks, security and testing tooling, governance tooling, and more.

Ecosystem Goals:

Develop robust, interoperable tooling that enhances developer experience, streamlines workflows, and supports the growth of the Soroban ecosystem.

• Develop tools that improve the developer efficiency by handling common, repetitive and trivial tasks in a smarter way, than if the developer would do it manually.

• Have tools that reflect the current features of Stellar at any given time. This means tools that support the current protocol, and tools that will be updated to support future protocol upgrades as they are released.

• Build a Soroban ecosystem with a top-tier developer experience.

• Create more tools that facilitate the integration of developers into the ecosystem (non-native blockchain developers as well as those from other blockchains).

• Tools that improve the developer efficiency by handling common, repetitive and trivial tasks in a smarter way than if the developer would do it manually.

Specific Needs:

• Standards around tracing/debugging/errors that are shared (and must be implemented) by developer tools, in order to create an ecosystem-based testing framework/pipeline.

• More collaboration between existing tools to avoid redundancy and, above all, consolidate the ecosystem with tools that are up-to-date, supported and viable in the long term.

• Starter templates for different categories, such as DeFi, NFT, smart wallets etc. with passkeys integration built-in. The templates can be with or without frontend.

• Developer tooling solutions which capitalize on and integrate Scaffold Stellar.

• Standards around tracing/debugging/errors that are shared (and mplemented) by developer tools, in order to create an ecosystem-based testing framework/pipeline.

Eligibility Criteria:

• Most dev tools should be open source (barring a very good reason).

• The tool must have adequate documentation, covering installation and usage instructions, and preferably also troubleshooting instructions. There should be a way for developers to report bugs, e.g. as GitHub Issues.

• Tooling must be released under permissive Open Source licenses, like MIT, BSD and Apache 2.0, and the source code must be available in a public repository.

• The team should provide a long term plan to have sustainable development. Is the grant going to be used only to give the idea a boost? Can the project leave without funding? What is the maintenance plan?

• Are there existing tools with similar functionality? If yes, how is this better/different? Could there be any opportunity for collaboration instead of creating a new competing tool? The competitive landscape of the tool should be covered in the submission.

• Why is this tool being built? Is it solving a pain point the developer has experienced personally? Has the need been discussed in the community? Has new features in Stellar created new needs for tooling?

• Why is the team/developer the right ones to develop this tool? Do they have experience with developing on Stellar, or do they have experience building tooling projects?