Announcing the Secret Network Grant Program

Secret Network
February 9, 2021
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Hello! This is an open call for the Secret Network community and all developers excited about the future of decentralized technologies. Come build Secret Apps, network improvements and ecosystem tools, and receive grants for your efforts!

The ideas listed below primarily utilize features that can only be built with Secret Network and are designed to bring meaningful adoption to the Secret ecosystem. This grant program will be the first major use of the Secret Network ecosystem pool that was funded with 20mn SCRT in the final days of 2020 – currently worth over $140M USD.

The list below is far from comprehensive. Instead, it should serve as a guide to ideas we’ve recognized to date as being of special interest to the community and essential to ongoing ecosystem growth. That said, we welcome any and all proposals and recognize that the most interesting proposals may be things the Secret Network community has yet to consider. Innovation knows no bounds!

For simplicity, we split proposals into three categories: Secret Apps, for everything that is directly built on top of Secret Network; Ecosystem, for tools that expand Secret Network and improve general usability; and Network improvements, for major upgrades to the network itself.

List of Funded Grants (11)

Secret Apps

Below we outline some potential applications, divided by vertical:

Secret DeFi

Secret DeFi is a privacy-first, front-running resistant DeFi ecosystem. After the release of SNIP-20 (a fungible privacy token standard) and the launch of the Secret Network – Ethereum bridge on mainnet, the community is now getting ready for the launch of SecretSwap, the first front-running resistant, cross-chain DEX!

With the building blocks of Secret DeFi ready, we welcome the community to submit grant proposals to build any of the applications below:

  • Staking derivatives to create capital efficiency in the Secret Network. Staking derivatives allow staked SCRT to be used for further yield opportunities in Secret DeFi. Here’s one attempt on a product roadmap.
  • Variable interest lending products: Either Secret-based implementations of ETH DeFi projects such as Compound or Aave, or brand new lending products leveraging Secret’s unique properties.
  • Algorithmic stable coin projects (such as Maker-type implementations). We believe it’s critical for the Web3 ecosystem to have a decentralized stable coin with privacy.
  • Dark pools (private orderbook exchange) for privacy preserving trading. A Dark Pools secret contract manages the encrypted order book in its state and can run multiple order matching methods such as Market / Limit / Stop-Loss orders. You can build on the SecretAuction repo, which uses a single sided orderbook.
  • Fixed income products: Fixed interest lending / borrowing products with insurance / liquidity pool to guarantee fixed payments.
  • Credit scoring and under collateralized lending using liquidity / insurance pools and Secret Oracles that tap into Web2 data sources like Plaid or centralized exchange balances. Undercollateralized loans can be built on top of Secret Network using on-chain privacy-preserving reputation credit scoring contracts.
  • Advanced AMM / CFMM DEXs optimized for low slippage trading (like Curve) or multiple pools (like Balancer) to create decentralized index funds. We encourage participants to launch the protocol with indices like Privacy Index, Data economy index etc.
  • Derivatives and Contract for Difference products with SCRT and SNIP20 collaterals
  • Options contracts: Put / call options based on an orderbook or AMM model with SCRT and SNIP20 collaterals
  • Synthetic Asset creation with SCRT and SNIP20 collaterals
  • Decentralized Perpetual Swap products leveraging SecretSwap (with vAMM similar to Perpetual Protocol with front-running resistance for more efficient capital deployment)
  • Insurance products for Secret DeFi

Secret Vaults

  • Decentralized Substack: Build a decentralized content (audio, blog) monetization tool for content stored on IPFS or another decentralized storage platforms. You can refer to this article for more information. Padlock and SecretVault contracts can also be an inspiration for access control related cases.
  • Ocean Data Token integration: Integrate Ocean Data Tokens to SecretVaults to allow trustless access to data token content.
  • Dead Man Switch: An event on the Secret Network (such as block numbers / elapsed time or a payment) triggers a secret contract to release a “secret” either to a selected recipient (private output) or the entire network (public state).
    Note: SecretVaults require whitelisted addresses to prevent offline data leakage attacks. Please get in touch with us to discuss secret contract security models. Here’s a repo and a forum post with active discussion.

Data Marketplaces

  • Trustless private computations for Ocean Protocol data marketplace
  • Crowd-sourced signal generation with staking incentives for SNIP20 and synthetic (Mirror Protocol) asset trading
  • Decentralized and privacy preserving machine learning use-cases (image recognition etc.)

Secret NFTs

  • Finalize SNIP-721 standard that allows for private ownership of NFTs and private metadata in NFTs (funded!)
  • Create SNIP-1155, based on ERC-1155 standard that allows for private ownership of NFTs and private metadata in NFTs
  • Secret Lootbox for Ethereum games: Lootbox NFTs used in Ethereum games would be represented with secretNFTs to reveal rewards only after NFT is claimed

Decentralized Governance and DAOs

  • SecretFund: Build a DAO funded by block rewards of delegators participating in the DAO. Delegators receive governance tokens proportional to their contribution. Governance tokens determine how the funds in SecretFund are managed.
  • SecretLaunchPad: Create a crowdfunding mechanism like Polkastarter, where Secret Network participant can support launch of products built on Secret Network or Ethereum (using the bridge). Using SNIP-20s, secretLaunchPad would allow anonymous investments.

Encrypted group messaging: Build a decentralized Signal / Telegram designed for encrypted group messaging. Determine a group admin to manage access rights to group and use secret contracts with encrypted state to host your secret group conversations.

Ecosystem

Interoperability

  • Secret Network – BTC Bridge
  • Secret Network – Polkadot Bridge: Either building on Wormhole or a bridge to EVM substrates like Moonbeam or Plasm
  • SecretTunnel – Interoperable Secrets: Create a contract to verify state changes and allow asset transfers between Secret Network and L2 Secret Network forks for big data and high throughput use-cases.

Oracles

  • Secret Oracles: Build TLS connection from validator enclaves to certain APIs to create private data feed for secret contracts (i.e. Binance and other exchange balances for decentralized credit scoring / leverage)
  • Public API oracles: Allow Secret Network validators (or nodes) to query public APIs for on-chain secret contract based oracle. Validators would reach on-chain consensus on inputs
  • Oracle support for Secret Network using Band Protocol (live!)
  • Oracle support for Secret Network using Chainlink

Developer tools and improvements

  • Tooling for one-click-run-and-deploy of contracts (like Remix for Secret Contracts)
  • Network forks suitable for Big Data and high throughput (< 1 second block time for orderbook based DEXs). This grant can be combined with Secret Tunnel
  • Create a library for running Secret Contract integration tests (like how Truffle uses Mocha/JS for Solidity)

Network improvements

While we intend to share more details on these potential protocol-level improvements in future posts, here is a brief list of possibilities:

  • ML Library that can run on-chain (requires deterministic floats or fixed-point support)
  • Differential privacy library for getter methods
  • Fully Homomorphic Encryption backend
  • Light-client validation inside of the enclave, in order to validate untrusted data (Bitcoin and Ethereum lite-clients etc.)

Grant Details

Please review the following details before applying

Funding amount

Funding amounts are variable and can go as high as several hundred thousand dollars, depending on the complexity and value to the network, although the average grant would likely be in the order of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Grants may be split into several smaller milestones and receive funding accordingly on a per-milestone basis, as mentioned below. Since this is a non-dilutive funding opportunity, we encourage commercial projects to also look for alternative sources of funding as well. We are especially interested in seeing new start-up companies and projects emerge that build exclusively on Secret Network. For these in particular, non-dilutive funding such as a grant would be significant.

Grant awards will be distributed in 3 or more installments, with initial payment to take place right after approval of the grant. Teams are expected to define key milestones for the project and propose installment amount upon completion of different milestones.

Requirements

All code must be open source. If there’s a good reason to make an exception, please specify this in your proposal, and emphasize which parts (if any) will be open source. Please mention the license you plan to use in your application.

Who are we looking for

We are looking for individual developers, new and existing companies and projects, community members or established teams with a proven track record to contribute to the Secret Network ecosystem. Prior work on Secret Network or experience in deploying Ethereum or other blockchain applications is a big plus.

Secret Apps are encouraged to have a path for commercial sustainability (token or fee model).

Ideation

Use Secret Network developer forum and Secret Network Discord (#use-cases and #find-a-team channels) to brainstorm, discuss ideas and form teams. We encourage you to get feedback from the community (including the Enigma development and product team) before submitting any application.

Application process

When ready, submit an application via the Grants area of the SCRT Labs GitHub repository. Do this by opening a new issue in the format of this sample application.

The application should cover the following details:

  • High level description of the project
  • Problem / solution (max. 200 words)
  • Detailed product / network improvement description (max. 500 words)
  • Go-to-market and commercialization plan (if applicable)
  • Team: Please share all past experiences, github links and repos
  • Milestones and budget: Please provide a budget, development timelines for milestones and distribution of budget based on milestones.

If you’d instead like to apply privately, please email [email protected] with the above information.

You can find a sample application here.

Evaluation process

We will review your application and get back to you with next steps (request for more information, schedule a video interview etc.) in two weeks.

Thank you for your interest in Secret Grants! We cannot wait to work alongside you in building Secret Network into a data privacy hub for all blockchains, helping secure the decentralized internet.

Onwards and upwards!

To discuss Secret Network and Secret Apps, visit our community channels:

Website | Forum | Twitter | Discord | Telegram