Announcing the Winners of Our 2021 R&D Grants

Last month we announced new community grants totaling 40 ETH toward the exploration, research and development across three important topics. We received an incredible number of submissions from our community and pored over numerous exciting and innovative ideas. While we wish we could fund all entries, after a careful review and selection process we have determined four project recipients for this year’s grants.

We are pleased to announce the following grant winners:

Research Grant: Token Economics

Award amount: 5 ETH | Winner: Omni Analytics

Omni Analytics is a data science company that performs research for several projects in the cryptocurrency industry, including the Ethereum Foundation, Numerai and Lykke Labs. They seek to link the attributes of a token’s initial distribution to their adoption as measured by on- chain metrics such as wallet total locked value and market capitalization. Utilizing data from across the blockchain they hope to find meaningful insights that can be used to guide and predict the future growth of decentralized protocols.

We're excited to be partnering up with Bloom to unearth data driven insights into how a token's initial distribution will affect their market adoption in the short and medium term.

- Lawrence

Research Grant: Token Economics

Award amount: 5 ETH | Winner: Square 1

Square 1 is a podcast and content series that aims to surface the design patterns present in today’s token networks, DAOs, decentralized products and communities. The platform seeks to create information that is insightful for crypto-natives and approachable for crypto-novices, alike. Square 1 has completed audits of MakerDAOs governance system and is continuing to focus on similar audits across a number of prominent platforms and DAOs within the community.

I’m extremely encouraged and grateful for Bloom Network’s early support of Square 1. They’ve proven to be an amazing team to work with.

– James Duncan

Build Grant: Unsecured Lending Vaults

Award amount: 20 ETH | Winner: Tilly Loan

Tilly Loan is an unsecured lending platform that leverages both on-chain and off-chain components to not only bring the value of DeFi to the real world but to democratize modern credit infrastructure for emerging markets. Tilly Loan is building an open banking platform in Africa, seeking to correct the many issues it has identified with how lending is performed throughout the region. The platform allows anyone to draw a credit line from an Aave credit delegation vault based on a risk assessment performed using the individual’s traditional financial data.

The Bloom team brings a wealth of expertise in decentralized identity and credit infrastructure; the grant not only supports initial development of the platform but the mentorship and guidance is invaluable.

– Victor Akinwande

Build Grant: Utility Experiments

Award amount: 10 ETH | Winner: Steven Yuan

Steven’s project aims to determine if a tokenized and decentralized identity platform like Bloom can help local governments build new tools to deter fraud and malicious actors from pushing their agenda in public meetings. As a remote-first lifestyle set about by the events related to COVID-19 allow everyday citizens to dial into government meetings, Steven’s project seeks to validate and incentivize good citizens to participate, while creating a medium to allow this at the government level.

As a deep advocate for design thinking, I strongly believe that good research and critical thought into the problems that Bloom could potentially solve are the precursor to ensuring that the protocol will thrive in the future. This grant will help us thoroughly study the needs in this space, as well as set up incentivized experiments to determine if we are able to effectively address those needs.

– Steven Yuan

Stay Tuned

We’re excited to see how these projects innovate in their respective fields and expand on their initial thesis. We intend to follow up and provide an update on our blog to keep our community informed on their progress and their eventual outcome. We also plan to do similar grants for other topics in the near future, especially as we see the space rapidly evolving with new and novel uses cases appearing overnight. These are exciting times for cryptocurrencies and the larger blockchain sector, and we envision the increased need for decentralized digital identity solutions in the near term and future.

Please email grants@bloom.co if you'd like an invite to our discord to collaborate with our community and stay up to date with the latest announcements.