Grants
Accelerates Sia’s vision of decentralized storage by empowering the open-source community.
Process
The Sia Foundation administers our global grants program to advance research, development, tooling, and other projects that grow and strengthen the ecosystem. Below, you’ll find details on grant requirements, the submission process, and how applications are evaluated.
- Luke Champine, Co-founder & Blockchain Researcher
- Nate Maninger, President
- Chris Schinnerl, Head of Engineering
- Manasi, former Sia ecosystem employee
- Mike76, Sia contributor
- Redsolver, Sia contributor
Review grant guidelines.
The Grants Committee convenes every two weeks to review new proposals, existing grants, and completed project outcomes. These are general guidelines for different grant sizes and can help you determine what level of funding to request. Before you begin, confirm that your project makes you eligible to receive a grant from the Sia Foundation.
As of April 2026, all grant proposals will now be required to focus on either one of the following themes: building with SDKs; or building on indexd.
Cross-check against evaluation rubric.
The Grants Committee reviews all proposals and evaluates them based on the following criteria:
- Mission Alignment: Does the proposal address a recognized need in the developer or user community? Is the need consistent with The Sia Foundation’s mission of "user-owned data"?
- Proposal Organization: Are the goals and objectives clearly written? Can the desired outcomes be easily tracked? Has a high-level architecture overview been included?
- Potential Impact: Will the successful execution of this project make a meaningful impact on the decentralized storage sector, data privacy community in general, and the Sia community in particular?
- Technical Feasibility: Is the project feasible and the risk reasonable for the timeline provided?
- Team Capabilities: Is it clear that the applying individual or organization has the technical capabilities to deliver on their proposal?
- Budget Justification: How well does the applicant justify the budget? Is the budget aligned with the technical difficulty and potential impact of the project?
Submit your proposal.
Include all required details directly in the form used. If key information is linked externally, you’ll be asked to add it to the post for archival purposes.
Grant Ideas
The Sia Foundation and Grants Committee are eager to see these projects built. Look for further project inspiration or recommend ideas that will benefit the Sia ecosystem on our Forum.
Top Priority Projects
- Sharing/viewing large single files (videos, data sets, high-res photos)
- Sharing files via platforms without vendor lock-in
- Small useful replacements for everyday tools utilizing SDKs
- Infrastructure - ex. Ability to QA existing/old integrations
- SDK use case: Small files with constant changes (solving repacking and syncing issues)
- Decentralized exchanges on Sia
As of April 2026
All grant proposals are required to focus on building with SDKs or on indexd.
Grants FAQs
Our goal for this program is to fund research, development, developer tools, and anything else that will support and further our mission of user-owned data while enriching the Sia ecosystem. Approved grant funds can cover all costs associated with your project. Common project fees include development, operations, services, and more.