Cartesi Grants Program: Wave 2 Wind-Down
This post marks the end of the Cartesi Grants Program Wave 2, and the Grants Council is excited to share updates from this wave. Please note that we are no longer accepting further applications under Wave 2.
In November 2024, the community passed a proposal to renew the Cartesi Grants Program for Wave 2, introducing the Intents and RFP framework to guide funding toward strategic ecosystem priorities.
We’d like to extend a huge thank you to the Cartesi community for your continued support through submitting proposals, engaging in discussions, and participating in governance voting. Your involvement is what drives the program forward.
One of the defining qualities of the Cartesi Grants Program is its iterative nature. We learn from each round and evolve the program accordingly. This allows us to allocate funds more effectively and stay aligned with the ecosystem’s evolving goals.
In Wave 1, we introduced four categories of funding to guide applications. From that experience, we learned that the program needed clearer strategic objectives to enhance focus and alignment with the community.
In Wave 2, we introduced the Intents and RFP framework as a foundational structure and direction to align the community and the ecosystem around common goals.
You can find a detailed overview of the Wave 2 structure and processes here.
Wave 2 Program Summary
Grants Council Members
The Grants Council consists of three members responsible for reviewing proposals across all funding categories.
- Hellenstans.eth - Grants Steward
- Pedro Argento - Technical reviewer
- João Garcia - Technical reviewer
Grants Summary
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Traffic & Users:
- 2,349 new visits directed to Cartesi Grants Program
- 109 new users joined Cartesi Charmverse space
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Ecosystem Participation
- 7 RFPs proposed by the community
- 4 RFPs adopted by the Grants Council
- 28 proposals submitted
- 17 proposals remained in draft stage
The program accepted applications on a rolling basis, with ongoing review by the Grants Council. Wave 2 also introduced more structured application templates and clearer refinement workflows to guide applicants in improving proposal quality and milestone submissions.
You can view all submitted proposals here and adopted RFPs here.
Approved Grants Summary - Wave 2
In Wave 2, we made deliberate efforts to focus on quality over quantity, approving the following projects that we determined to have the desired community impact:
- RiscZero + Cartesi Integration Template and Documentation Project - 50,000 CTSI tokens
- This project aims to develop a streamlined integration template for combining RiscZero’s zkVM with Cartesi. This will enable privacy-preserving computations within the Cartesi Machine. The integration will provide developers with a ready-to-use framework for executing zk-proof verification inside Cartesi.
- Cartesi – Chainlink Library - 55,000 CTSI tokens
- The Cartesi-Chainlink Library aims to seamlessly integrate Chainlink’s automation services with the Cartesi ecosystem, empowering developers to easily implement advanced automation features within Cartesi dApps.
Conclusion
This wraps up our recap of Wave 2. We hope it offers useful insights into what was achieved and what we learned in the second wave of the Cartesi Grants Program.
As we move forward, we will continue to assess and review the active grants from Wave 2 to ensure they are delivering on their intended outcomes.
At the same time, we will be taking a deliberate pause in the program to reflect, learn, and analyse the overall impact of Wave 2 — particularly in understanding how these grant programs serve as key touch points with the community.
Huge thanks to our Grants Council members, grantees, Cartesi core contributors, our program partners CharmVerse, and most importantly, to our community for your continued support.
If you have any feedback, feel free to share it in the comments below. Keep building!