IOTA has announced the ‘IOTA Ecosystem Fund’, which is valued above $2,000,000. This fund is dedicated entirely towards fostering growth of IOTA through incentivizing participation in expanding and shaping the ecosystem.
The company has encouraged anyone from makers to distributed ledger enthusiasts to explore the possibilities of new applications through IOTA’s distributed ledger technology, from projects like adding sensors to a Raspberry Pi and making it useful through IOTA to something more complex, the IOTA Ecosystem Fund exists to provide these opportunities.
As elucidated in the public IOTA Development Roadmap, the engineering philosophy behind IOTA is one of modularity and pragmatism. Rather than attempting to create a ‘all in one’ universal solution, IOTA intends to instead keep the underlying ledger protocol as basic and efficient as possible and to extend its utility through the IOTA eXtension Interface(IXI). Anyone can build an IXI module, whether it be for their own needs, due to there being a demand for it, or simply for the love of creating something useful. New IXI modules take a lot of time to develop due to the vast amount of time that goes into research. People more inclined towards researching topics and writing whitepapers than coding can also apply for funding.
In addition to that, the company also wants to make the overall development of IOTA easier and widen its utility through libraries, and so encourages any idea for a libraries which could be useful for the community to apply for development funding. In a similar vein, IOTA Learn is curating tutorials on how to get started using and implementing IOTA into projects. In order to ensure a certain quality and maintenance of tutorials, significant sums will be allocated towards this section. People who have done a Proof of Concept or similar on IOTA and wish to share the step by step process on how they did it can earn money whist doing this.
Applicants applying for funding in any of these categories are required to fill out a form with some basic questions, including ones about the total desired budget for the project, its scope, description, timeline etc. Community representatives will then respond, ask more questions and define the deliverables of the project. After the terms has been agreed upon the IOTA Foundation will greenlight the project and grant the first payment for the project to officially start.
