Submission Review Criteria

Incoming submissions are reviewed in detail and only those that can check all the below requirements, and don’t fall under any ineligible category, will be considered for selection. Also, make sure that your submission has all the context a reviewer may need and doesn’t require any additional context: the panel does not take any other information into account other than what is mentioned in the submission.

• The Participant, Project and Submission meet the Participant and Submission Eligibility Requirements;

• The Participant needs to demonstrate that their Project has been sufficiently found product market fit, proving either with significant user traction, or a validated need identified by a team or individual experienced in the Stellar ecosystem;

• The Submission and deliverables need to be of high quality, clear in language, and rich in (technical) details;

• The Participant needs to clearly explain how Stellar is and will be integrated into the Project, as both a use case and technical integration, along with a technical architecture outline.

• The Participant needs to demonstrate that they are ready to start building immediately after receiving an Award (e.g. needs to be able to dedicate developers experienced in the relevant languages to the project);

• The Project needs to demonstrate it is using or will use Stellar to significantly improve its core features, and explain why they're using Stellar;

• If the Project intends to develop Stellar smart contracts (using the Soroban platform), the Project needs to clearly explain a plan to open-source these smart contracts.

• The requested budget needs to only cover costs related to the development of the project built on Stellar, and be reasonable for its project scope, stage, and impact to the Stellar ecosystem according to the SCF Build Award Budget Guidelines;

• Tranches should be separated in MVP, Testnet, and Mainnet, and contain feasible deliverables. All deliverables need to be clear with sufficient detail and achievable planning (reminder - the Testnet tranche is unpaid but unlocks the Stellar LaunchKit);

• Participants need to demonstrate that their Project is unique and competitive, and show how it provides clear value to the Stellar ecosystem;

Category Specific Submission Criteria

You can find more specific eligibility criteria for each project category below:

(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.

• Support more multichain wallets. Have them integrate popular Stellar DeFi protocols such as Blend, Aquarius, etc. to bring more users to Stellar (similar to what Hot Wallet is doing right now).

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 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.

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 amount 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 enable the synthetic representation of assets and make usable and composable on Stellar. These could be real world assets, currencies, commodities or even digital assets on other networks.

• Projects which enable options and derivatives are critical building blocks for more sophisticated financial products and strategies. The projects the ecosystem needs will be less focused on offering these capabilities to retail traders and more focused on building these markets for other protocols and developers to leverage to make their products safer and more stable for their end users.

• Projects which provide yield aggregation, strategy automation and opportunities for monetization for both applications and the operators and managers of the underlying strategies will enable our ecosystem to scale to 10’s then 100’s of millions of users while providing the incentives necessary to both grow and support that user base.

• Projects which build decentralized infrastructure for efficient markets, whether those are trading markets or markets in the real world. Trading and settlement services like escrows, insurance and credit functionality like credit scoring and underwriting, offered in a decentralized and economically viable way will find demand in diverse markets from buying real property in developing markets, to settling complex financial trades between parties who are unknown to each other.

Eligibility Criteria

• 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 have a good understanding of the existing Stellar ecosystem and the existing projects within it. You shouldn’t be rebuilding something which is already available in our ecosystem. We want to encourage reuse as well as competition, so if your project includes building something which already exists in the ecosystem you should tell us why what currently exists doesn’t fit your needs or why what your building moves the frontier forward.

• Projects should have a monetization and revenue model, this doesn’t need to be set in stone, but we want to see you have put some thought into how the project sustains itself over the long term. A well thought through plan would include considerations like what value is created for users, what share of that value is captured by the protocol and how, as well as how you will incentivize other ecosystem participants to support and integrate your service.

• 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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

Important Note for Issuers of Fiat-Backed Tokens:

If your Project already issues or plans to issue a stablecoin or digital asset backed by fiat currency as a part of your SCF submission, you will need to complete a Stellar Info File, and as per the requirements in the Stellar documentation, it must include a URL to an attestation or other proof, evidence, or verification of sufficient reserves, such as a third-party audit.

Important Note for Recipients of other Funds, Grants, or Investments from SDF:

• Entities in which either the Matching Fund or Enterprise Fund have invested are not eligible to receive an SCF Award.

• Recipients of any currently outstanding Research & Development Grant and/or Academic Research Grant are not eligible to receive an SCF Award unless and until such recipient has submitted all required deliverables and fulfilled all obligations under their respective Grant Agreement(s).

• Recipients of any currently outstanding Marketing Grant, Currency Support Grant, and Ecosystem Infrastructure Grant, will not be eligible to receive an SCF Award for any project or deliverable that falls within the scope, whether directly or indirectly, of their respective Grant Agreement(s).

• Recipients of prior SCF Awards are permitted to resubmit a new Project to a subsequent SCF Round, but they will be required to show that their previously awarded Project has achieved significant progress on the goals set forth in their previous submission (at SDF’s discretion).