Solana Foundation Balkan Grants

💸 Up to $10k to Build on Solana

Superteam Balkan now supports Solana Foundation Grants. These grants support builders across all categories leveraging the Solana blockchain - from consumer apps and DeFi to infrastructure, DePIN, RWA and beyond.

The grants may be allocated toward a variety of project use cases, including further development, marketing, business expansion, infrastructure expenses, audits, and other project-related needs.

Note: We do not provide grants to projects that have previously received an investment or this same grant. 

🎯 Areas of focus:

1. Fintech & Onchain Finance: Consumer and enterprise financial applications on Solana, including stablecoin payments, remittances, payroll, wallets, on/off-ramps, or embedded crypto-native banking.
2. Trading, DeFi & Internet Capital Markets: Create high-performance trading infrastructure such as DEXs, derivatives platforms, order-book markets, liquidity aggregation, or automated trading strategies.
3. RWA & Institutional Finance: Develop platforms for tokenizing, issuing, settling, and trading real-world assets such as bonds, credit, real estate, or other regulated financial instruments on Solana.
4. Privacy: Build privacy-preserving systems including confidential transactions, zero-knowledge execution, private DeFi primitives, or compliance-aware privacy solutions for institutional and enterprise use cases.
5. AI-Powered & Agentic Systems: Create Solana-native AI agents, automated market participants, agentic trading systems, agentic yield farming or intelligent financial infrastructure on Solana.
6. Payments & Commerce: Build consumer and merchant payment solutions, point-of-sale systems, subscription tools, invoicing, and commerce integrations leveraging Solana Pay and stablecoins.
7. Developer Tooling & Infrastructure: Create SDKs, CLIs, APIs, testing frameworks, analytics tools, data indexing, interoperability layers, and developer platforms that make building scalable Solana applications faster and easier.
8. Education & Community: Create media, programs, events, and initiatives to onboard users, earners, and builders to Solana and crypto.   

⚙️ How It Works:

1. Submit the application form on Superteam Earn.
2. The grant review committee does their best to respond within ~30 days.
3. If approved, you'll receive an email notification for further steps to receive your first payment tranche.
4. Update the community once a week on your progress.
5. As you achieve your self-described milestones, the request for the next payment tranche is submitted for review and received once approved.
6. Submit finished work for feedback, review, and distribution.

🤝 Submission Guidelines

1. Be Concise: Being clear, concise and to the point is always helpful. Organize the information you provide into short and cohesive bullet points instead of long paragraphs. Avoid having any buzzwords or lengthy sentences in your project one-liner and description.
2. Avoid overusing AI: If the grant submission you provide is heavily AI generated without any revisions, this will lead to a certain rejection of your submission. Using AI to generate a description or milestones for your project is a signal that you do not have enough understanding around it, which is a negative indicator for the reviewers.
3. Build what the ecosystem needs: Make sure the project or idea you want to build has been validated by proper market research and analysis. Start with a problem and then work towards a solution. For maximum impact, aim to obtain some user feedback even before you start shipping.
4. Filling out the information:
   1. Your project one-liner should be 10 words maximum and should serve as an immediate analogy to the reader (e.g. Kickstarter on Solana)
   2. The proof of work section should include links to what you have built so far as well as some previous projects (app/demo URLs, GitHub repos etc.)
   3. The goals and milestones should include a breakdown by months or weeks (based on the deadline) and meaningful goals that you wish to accomplish until the deadline by using the grant.
   4. The deadline is not a strict date, however make sure you provide a realistic date until which the milestones can be delivered and the goals can be accomplished.
   5. Make sure to leave a proper point of contact in case we need to reach out, ideally Telegram/Discord/X handle. 

❓Frequently asked questions

• Who is eligible to apply for an Instagrant?
• Any Solana builder in the Balkan region!
• How fast is "Instant"?
• Grant requests are typically reviewed in 30 days or less.
• What criteria will the panelists use to evaluate grants?
• We prefer projects that 1) can make a meaningful impact on Solana & beyond and 2) ship updates quickly
• What conditions apply for receiving my upcoming tranche?
• You need to keep the community and core team updated on a regular basis as your project progresses, as well as stay accountable for your milestones and the deadline.
• What is the philosophy behind the Instagrants program
• Proof of Work > Credentials. Anyone is welcome to apply for Instagrants, given they have enough Proof of Work to make the review committee believe the work will get done.
• Speed > Perfection. We want to give grants rapidly. Not perfectly. We trust people to get work done.
• Believers > Consensus. As long as a minimum quorum of the reviewing committee believes it's a good use of funds, we will fund it.
• Will I receive feedback on my proposal if it is rejected?
• Unfortunately, our reviewers do not have the ability to provide individualized feedback at this time. 

 

Note: The Superteam Balkan team does not manage the Foundation’s grant program. We simply make recommendations to the sponsors of the grant program on quality grant applications. You are also free to apply directly on their website for a grant.

 

🚁 Have a question that isn't answered here? Write to us at matija@solbound.dev.