Announcing the winners of SCF #8!

Today, we are excited to announce the winners of the 8th round of the Stellar Community Fund (SCF). After two weeks of deliberation, a panel of 43 judges drawn from both the Stellar Development Foundation and the greater Stellar community voted to award 11 projects their requested budgets, and to give away a grand total of 3,219,858 XLM.

We restructured this round a bit based on community feedback — each project specified a budget request; judges considered those requests when voting — and as a result, the winners range from fun hackathon-style projects to launch-ready businesses building the future of finance. It’s a diverse set of projects, and we’re excited to see what they do next!

Without further ado, here are the winners ranked by highest vote:

1. InstantDAO — $50,000 worth of XLM*

InstantDAO enables Stellar projects to quickly setup and operate governance DAOs (distributed autonomous organization), adding decentralized governance features to their assets.

2. CryptoCannoneer — $5,000 worth of XLM*

CryptoCannoneer is a livestream shooting gallery game where players fire tennis balls at targets in our warehouse. Participants control a turret over the internet to aim and fire — bringing blockchain gaming into the real world!

3. BBB HACKATON — $4,900 worth of XLM*

Organized in collaboration with professors from ESADE, a global top management school, the BBB Hackaton will engage students from different countries in order to find new blockchain solutions in different industries.

4. Wally — $4,800 worth of XLM*

Wally is a P2P marketplace for online experiences, aimed to give users the freedom to break through the boundaries of conventional payments.

5. CryptoCannonneer’s Coin Carnival — $15,000 worth of XLM*

The CryptoCannoneer Coin Carnival aims to gamify crypto literacy. By creating a unique and engaging experience to teach tokenomic concepts, my project will help people learn using “play to earn” and “learn and earn” methodologies.

6. Stellar PHP SDK — $225,000 worth of XLM*

The new Stellar PHP SDK will make it easy for PHP developers to access the Stellar Network by providing APIs to build and sign transactions, connect and query Horizon.

7. OrunPay — $236,763 worth of XLM*

OrunPay is a company dedicated to improving the financial inclusion and flexibility of Cubans. This is to be accomplished by putting money directly into the hands of Cuban nationals and giving them the freedom to decide what to do with it and when.

8. FijiCoin — $50,000 worth of XLM*

Fijicoin aims to create a FIAT-collateralized stablecoin, pegged against the Fijian Dollar, to be used in a digital wallet that enables users to send/ receive remittances via the Stellar network.

9. Kunst21.com — $111,600 worth of XLM*

Kunst21.com is a crowdinvesting platform to allow everyone to invest in art and collectibles, by connecting aspiring and consolidated artists with retail and professional investors from the whole world.

10. Answerly — $150,000 worth of XLM*

Answerly is a blockchain-based Q/A platform that allows users to earn crypto by adding well-researched and high-quality answers to different questions.

11. Tellus Cooperative — $29,500 worth of XLM*

Founded in 2019 in Chile, Tellus Cooperative aims to create a system of cooperation-based savings within a decentralized economic network to bridge the gap between workers, small businesses, and the retail investor by strengthening their involvement in the DeFi economy.

There were a ton of great projects this round, so if you didn’t make the cut don’t give up! We will open submissions for SCF #9 on September 29th — a mere 2 days from now! — and you can take what you’ve learned to do an even better job crafting your next application. We will share more info and tips in the next few days, but the most important things to keep in mind are:

1) Pick a reasonable budget

Because voting is based on approval of the project budgets, those budgets play a crucial role in judges’ decisions. Projects with bigger budget requests have a higher bar for selection. When determining your budget request, try to assess what you need to get your project to the next milestone — something you can reach in 3–6 months — and base your request on that assessment.

2) Engage the community

There is a reason why it’s called the Stellar Community Fund! To increase the likelihood of advancing in the SCF, you need to get in with the community. That means posting frequently on relevant channels, answering questions, and joining community events. Get your name out there, get people’s attention, and earn their trust!

Thanks to the judges and the Stellar community as a whole for evaluating, engaging with, and supporting these projects, and congratulations to the winners! We wish you all the very best, and look forward to watching your projects evolve and grow.

*The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on September 27, 2021 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)

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