The instrument
The testnet grants programme and the hackathon both pay in tDMS — testnet DMS with no economic value, which resets on major runtime upgrades. Their documents carry a legal notice: prizes and grants represent no financial commitment of the protocol; any future consideration is subject to on-chain governance once a mainnet exists.
There are no convertible grants, no token warrants, no equity for builders, no revenue share. The previous version of this page announced convertible instruments for another ecosystem's projects.
Why
- There is nothing to convert into. No mainnet, no market, no valuation a conversion could reference. Promising future tokens for present work is a securities question the ecosystem has chosen not to raise.
- The ecosystem has no private allocation to draw from. One public sale at one price is its rule; a builder fund would be capitalised from exactly the tranche it does not have.
- Honesty about stage. A grant that pays real money for testnet work implies the testnet is a product. The programme's own document says it cannot open until a faucet and a stable explorer exist.
What a grantee gets
Elevated faucet allowance; a private channel with the core team (24-hour weekday response); a playground slot in the explorer; public listing; early review of pallet and SDK integrations. Commitments: 100 verifiable transactions, open source, a demo, a reproducible README, at least one native pallet.
What the treasury would fund
Once there is a mainnet: 150 M DMS at genesis, income from 20 % of fees, spending capped at 10 % per year, allocated by on-chain proposals. That is the ecosystem's funding mechanism — governed, capped, transparent — and it is the only one designed to pay real value. It does not exist until the mainnet gate passes.
The governance angle
The governance design's iron rules include sale allocations are irrevocable and no entity above 10 % effective voting power. A grants programme that issued tokens or equity to builders would interact with both; keeping grants in testnet tokens keeps them out of that arithmetic until governance can decide it.
For a builder
If you need money, this is not the programme. If you want a runtime with 140 pallets, a team that answers, and a public record of what you shipped, it is — once it opens.
Based on TESTNET_GRANTS_PROGRAM.md, TESTNET_HACKATHON_PLAN.md (legal notice), TOKENOMICS_CANONICO.md and the governance design.