- Blog
- Announcements
- First Worldcoin Community Grants awarded to 28 projects across 5 continents
First Worldcoin Community Grants awarded to 28 projects across 5 continents
Evolving Captchas; improving blockchain elections; independent verification of ZkCircuits; alternative orb assembly; real world UBI—these are just some of the projects being worked on by the recipients of Worldcoin’s inaugural Community Grants Program Wave0.
Today, the Worldcoin Foundation is excited to announce the Inaugural Grantees of the Worldcoin Community Grants Program Wave0! In total, approximately 800,000 WLD will be awarded to 28 projects spanning 5 continents, each committed to progressing different parts of the Worldcoin Tech Tree.
A core focus of the Community Grants Program is to create more opportunities for the greater community of builders to meaningfully contribute towards the advancement of Worldcoin. In pursuit of this mission, the Worldcoin Foundation has published an ambitious roadmap for robustness sharing its thinking on focus areas for improvement of the protocol. Significant commitment will be required in order to tackle just some of these goals, but the most optimal outcomes can only be achieved if we build towards this future together.
Grantees advancing the Worldcoin Tech Tree
Kicking off Wave0, the initial call for applications sought projects focused on:
- World ID applications
- World ID protocol
- User agent
- Hardware
- Operations
In just under 6 weeks, the Community Grants Program received overwhelming responses from over 1000 community projects applying for grant funding. Across the world, applicants requested support for local meetup groups and hackathons, novel governance experiments, cryptographic research, zkml & MPC implementations, countless WorldID integrations, and so much more.
While not every proposal could be accepted, each of the applicants to the inaugural Worldcoin Community Grants Wave0 can undoubtedly still play a role in helping scale and develop a more robust Worldcoin. The 28 selected teams represent only a subset of the innovative ideas and core primitives being formulated and developed by the wider community, and will serve as a foundation on which others in the community can more feasibly build for impact going forward.
To highlight just a few of these projects:
- Gas Limit Research by Nethermind will focus on gas limits in EVM chains and execution time, particularly in isolated environments
- Wonderland will work on a POC of “ReputationID” to support on-chain governors and more effective anti-Sybil measures using World ID
- With Chain Partners, early research and development proposes to improve the existing infrastructure for future orb development
- From Nebra, modified zk-proof aggregation protocol may unlock more affordable onchain proof verifications
- A Merkle Tree Explorer can potentially make the World ID protocol more transparent and accessible for others
As progress is presented publicly to the community and further infrastructure is developed in the open, we hope to continue building on the momentum of passionate builders to support even more impactful projects and events. For the full list of Wave0 Grant recipients and project descriptions, check out the Worldcoin Grantee page.
Empowering a diverse community of builders
An overarching mission of the Worldcoin Foundation is to provide everyone access to the global economy by embedding humanness into the world’s digital infrastructure. This is reflected in the geographic diversity of Wave0 Grant recipients coming from more than a dozen countries across five continents, including Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and Uruguay. With such a diverse community of builders, many of the Grantees are building grassroots solutions for both the circumstances around them, as well as for the future world they hope to see only unlocked with Worldcoin as a critical piece of infrastructure.
Looking ahead
Over the coming weeks, we’re thrilled to open more public channels for grant recipients to share their experiences going through the application process, as well as progress updates for everyone to follow along, or even contribute to their open source repos.
For the most updated information on upcoming Community Grants Program Waves, visit the Worldcoin website. You can also join the daily conversations on Twitter/X, Telegram, Discord and LinkedIn or sign up for the blog newsletter at the bottom of this page.
To learn more about Worldcoin and additional important information, check out the Worldcoin protocol whitepaper.
Eligibility for Worldcoin (WLD) tokens is restricted based on geography, age, and other factors. WLD are not available to, or intended for, people or companies who are residents of, or are located, incorporated or have a registered agent in, the United States or certain other restricted territories. However, World ID and TFH’s World App remain available in the United States. For details, go to: www.worldcoin.org/tos. Crypto products can be highly risky. Important User Information can be found at www.worldcoin.org/risks.
The above content speaks only as of the date indicated. Further, it is subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, and so may be incorrect and may change without notice. A full disclaimer can be found in our Terms of Use and Important User Information can be found on our Risks page.