The following is a list of the submission and eligibility criteria and guidelines for the Avalanche Foundation’s Icebreaker Program.
The matters set out below are of an indicative nature, and do not comprise an exhaustive set of considerations. Please use your good judgment. The following matters should also help applicants understand the Program’s ethos and goals.
The Avalanche Foundation reserves the right to deny any application for any reason. Due to legal restrictions across the entire spectrum of countries contributing to the Avalanche ecosystem, applications submitted as legal in one jurisdiction may be denied based on standards held in others.
Submission Guidelines:
Submissions that include ANY of the following characteristics will not be approved:
- Gambling (including prediction markets), drugs, or firearm;
- Illicit trade, money laundering, or any criminal activity;
- “Virtual Asset Services,” including public token launches and holding/selling/issuing/exchanging virtual assets on behalf of others;
- Projects focused on using token as a financial instrument (including token distributions, creating a new token, making investments and generating returns, buyback or dividend features, exchange listings for $AVAX or other tokens, etc.);
- Any provision of funds (direct or indirect) to sanctioned persons or projects involving such persons, and any project team applying for funding shall have done its due diligence prior to making any application for funding and shall, at the request of the Avalanche Foundation provide copies or evidence of such due diligence having been undertaken and the outcome of that due diligence investigation;
- Requests for endorsement from the Avalanche Foundation; or
- Projects where any member of the team is based in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, or any other country or jurisdiction sanctioned by OFAC.
In addition, the following are not permitted in any projects that are funded by the
Avalanche Foundation:
- Hateful Content - No racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful speech, no discrimination;
- Deceiving Users - Malicious content that could cause harm or unintended consequences to users;
- Falsification - Any type of hacking to falsify a contribution is prohibited. No encouraging or enabling Sybil attacks or other forms of malicious manipulation;
- Fraud & Impersonation - Claiming to be a brand or person you are not: the Grant owner must be directly affiliated with the project and the funds must go to the project and be used for the purposes stated in the Grant’s details;
- Quid Pro Quo & Bribery - The Grant may not have any form of quid pro quo that has financial value (a scenario in which a user gets some additional unique benefit/award in return for their donation);
- Advertising - Using Grants to showcase something you are selling, like a token sale or NFT drop;
- Grantees may not be subject to sanctions, and funding cannot be used in violation of any applicable law, rules, or regulations (for example, those addressing sanctions, financing of terrorism, and anti-money-laundering); and
- Grantees can be eliminated from consideration in the round if they are found to be encouraging or enabling Sybil attacks or other forms of malicious manipulation.
The Avalanche Foundation reserves the right to take such action as it considers appropriate in the event that any of the foregoing is breached (including but not limited to canceling any commitment to fund or the project being required to return amounts already funded).
Eligibility Criteria:
To be eligible for consideration for a Grant under the Avalanche Foundation’s Icebreaker Program, teams must satisfy one or more of the following criteria:
- Projects and grantees must contribute to the Avalanche Ecosystem in some demonstrable way. The grant must aim to support or directly advance the Avalanche ecosystem. This includes areas like:
- Public Goods Software
- Analytics
- Education
- On-Chain Infrastructure and Protocols
- DeFi
- Gaming
- NFT / Arts & Culture
- Consumer Applications
- History of contributing to the Avalanche Ecosystem: while this is not a hard requirement, previous contributions by applicants to the Avalanche ecosystem will be taken into consideration.