As part of our university engagement programme (see here), we would like to request

• our fourth phase of funding (£30k in DOT) to pay for our accelerator organisational costs.
• our fifth phase of funding (£30k in DOT) to pay grants to accelerator teams ($4k x 10)

With this fourth tranche funding, we aim to achieve the milestone of delivering the accelerator in full, having 50 applying teams sign up, up to 10 projects chosen, and a half to go on to become funded startups.

Polkadot Accelerator Report (Tranche 4)

We would like to report on the success of our fourth tranche (Polkadot accelerator) as part of the Encode x Polkadot programme (see here).

Previous Proposals

Please see the discussions below:

• Education Series (tranche 1)
• Hackathon (tranche 2)
• Paying Hackathon prizes (tranche 3)

Background information

This accelerator was a pan-Polkadot ecosystem programme to take great hackathons and researchers’ projects building on the Polkadot ecosystem and help them become startups. It ran online, with weekly workshops hosted on zoom and day-day coordination via Discord. Teams were supported with regular 1-1 calls with the Encode team. We were joined by Moonbeam, Phala, Astar, Acala, Subquery, Moonbeam, and Interlay, who also offered challenges in the hackathon.

There were various workshops hosted, such as:

Design by Matko, Encode Club
Marketing by Carol-Ann, Igor from Parity
AMA by Alexei from Interlay
Fundraising by Gianni from Hypersphere

8 teams successfully finished the accelerator program. 3 teams secured the grants during the program. 1 team is in the fundraising round. Other teams are in preparation for the grant applications.

This accelerator was budgeted at £30k, the large majority of which was spent on staffing costs to run the event.

All information about the programme and final pitch can be found here.

Accelerator Grants (Tranche 5)

As part of the accelerator, each team (10 in total) was given a $4k grant subject to completing the accelerator (see here for full proposal).