Stellar Development Foundation Academic Research Grants: September 30, 2026 deadline
Stellar Development Foundation grants of up to $150,000 for academic blockchain research. Next deadline September 30, 2026.
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) Academic Research Grants fund university research on blockchain topics. The foundation reviews proposals four times a year. The next deadline is September 30, 2026. The one after that is December 31.
The budget can be up to $150,000. A rough average of past funded proposals is $75,000. The money is meant to pay for one graduate student or one post doc for 12 months, plus costs such as conference travel. Awards go to the academic institution as unrestricted gifts, never to individuals.
You must have PI status at a degree granting institution whose main mission is research or higher education. Students, consultants, companies and institutions that do not grant degrees cannot apply. SDF points them to the Stellar Community Fund instead. Each applicant can send at most 2 proposals per calendar year.
Topics include privacy technology, formal verification, Byzantine fault tolerant networks, the Federated Byzantine Agreement model, DeFi market mechanisms, scalability, smart contract languages, governance of distributed systems and empirical studies of the Stellar network. Proposals should make new scientific contributions. Literature reviews are out of scope.
The proposal is a PDF of up to 3 pages. It needs a title, an abstract, a short PI biography, a statement of PI status, the technical proposal, a budget, a statement of intent not to patent the results and a bibliography. You submit it through the form linked from the SDF research grants page.