April has been a month of cautious optimism. Bitcoin has been consolidating around the $76–78K range, sentiment swung sharply from Fear to Greed mid-month, and markets remain in wait-and-see mode — geopolitical tensions, macro uncertainty, and a strong Bitcoin dominance above 60% keeping altcoins relatively quiet. For builders focused on grants and non-dilutive funding, though, the signal-to-noise ratio looks better than the price charts suggest: ecosystems are actively deploying capital, programmes are running, and the conference season is heating up fast with Athens, Prague, Berlin, and Singapore all on the horizon.
On that note, a quick update from our end: web3grants.co has now reached 6,000+ builders across 31 countries, with 350+ monthly unique users and 150+ active grants updated every 48 hours. 100% organic growth, no ads, no sponsored content. Just a free tool that works. If you haven’t tried the AI-powered Grant Finder yet, now is a good time.
Here’s your curated update for April.
Here’s a fresh batch of funding opportunities for builders, researchers, and innovators in Web3:
Avalanche Foundation — Research Grants on Network Economics Up to $50,000 for original academic research across two areas: cryptoasset pricing and valuation, and validator economics and network security. Open to researchers in economics, finance, computer science, and related disciplines — both academic and independent. Grants are disbursed across three milestones over 12 months, and selected grantees will have the opportunity to present at the Crafting the Cryptoeconomy Conference at Columbia University this fall. Focus: Research, Infra, Public Goods
Alchemy Solana Fund Up to $25K per team applied directly to your Alchemy account, built for teams who want to ship faster on Solana. Three tiers to match your stage: Trial ($250 credits for early builders), Grow ($500–$1,000 for teams scaling to production), and Enterprise (up to $25,000 for large-scale institutional needs). Focus: AI, AIAgents, Infra, DeFi, Dev Tooling, Stablecoins & Payments
Kite AI Global Hackathon 2026 Build and launch autonomous AI agents on the first AI Payments Blockchain. Three tracks: Agentic Commerce (agents that discover, pay, and manage USDC via x402), Agentic Trading (agents that analyse markets, execute trades, and manage risk), and Novel Track (anything that runs on Kite and pushes the frontier). Focus: AI, AIAgents, Infra, DeFi, Dev Tooling
Zama Developer Program — Mainnet Season 2 Season 2 raises the stakes with a new Bounty challenge centred on building AI agent skills for FHE, a Bootcamp Track for first-timers, and a dedicated APAC track via OpenBuild. All hackathon winners are interviewed for Colosseum’s accelerator — with $250,000 pre-seed funding on the table. Deadline: May 10 Focus: AI, AIAgents, Infra, DeFi, Dev Tooling
Arbitrum Open House London A builder program and startup accelerator for founders launching new businesses on the Arbitrum platform. Open to all early-stage teams building AI, payments, or DeFi primitives onchain. A direct on-ramp into one of the most active L2 ecosystems. Focus: AI, AIAgents, Infra, DeFi, Dev Tooling, Stablecoins & Payments
Solana Frontier Hackathon Colosseum’s latest hackathon targets builders shipping real infrastructure on Solana. All winners are interviewed for the Colosseum accelerator program — accepted teams receive $250,000 in pre-seed funding, network access, and mentorship to take their project to the next level. Focus: Infra, DeFi, Dev Tooling
Interledger Open Payments SDK Grant The Interledger Foundation is funding proposals to improve the Open Payments developer experience — covering RFC 9635 GNAP support, Kiota SDK generators across TypeScript, PHP, Python, Go, Rust and Ruby, HTTP Message Signatures, and Arazzo Specification integration. Bounties range from $1,000 to $25,000 per deliverable. Focus: DeFi, Dev Tooling, Infra, Stablecoins & Payments
Unconventional AI Grants A $500K Academic Research Fund offering $100K grants for groundbreaking work in unconventional computing — neuromorphic hardware, novel neural network architectures, 3D computing and memory integration, and Theory of AI. Preference given to research with a credible path to volume manufacturing within 5 years. Focus: AI, AIAgents, Infra
Ethereum Audit Subsidy Program A joint initiative with audit providers subsidising the cost of security audits for Ethereum builders — covering up to 30% of the total cost. Security audits are best practice but often out of reach; this programme makes them accessible while strengthening the ecosystem as a whole. Focus: Privacy & Security, Infra, Public Goods, Dev Tooling, ZK
One of the quieter conversations in Web3 grant-making right now is about the direction of time.
Traditional grants ask contributors to pitch work they haven’t done yet. That model rewards people who are good at writing proposals — not necessarily the people doing the most valuable work. The builder who tracked down an obscure bug, the person who rewrote the documentation so newcomers could finally get started, the developer who shipped a small tool that quietly became infrastructure everyone depends on — none of them were likely sitting down to write a grant application first.
Retroactive funding approaches this differently. It evaluates completed contributions with observable impact. The work speaks for itself.
Glow, a new program by XRPL Commons, is a recent example. Running in monthly waves, it recognises and rewards contributors who have already made a meaningful impact on the XRPL ecosystem — through protocol improvements, open-source tooling, documentation, or community building. Rewards range from Small (~50 XRP) to Large (~3,000 XRP), sent directly to contributors’ wallets. Contributors don’t need to apply — they get nominated by peers, voted on by the community, and evaluated by judges. It lowers a real barrier: having to ask for funding upfront.
On a different but related note, the Protocol Institute — relaunched from the Summer of Protocols, originally seeded by the Ethereum Foundation — is building longer-term institutional infrastructure for the study and stewardship of protocols as public goods. Less about individual rewards, more about making the field itself more legible and sustainable over time.
Retroactive funding as a model isn’t new — Optimism’s RPGF rounds have been running since 2022 and have distributed significant capital across multiple cycles. But programs like Glow suggest the approach is finding its way into smaller, community-level ecosystems too. Whether that scales meaningfully remains to be seen. For builders in the meantime, the practical implication is simple: ship, document your impact, and stay visible in your ecosystem.
Plenty of excellent gatherings to meet other builders, show what you’re working on, and stay close to ecosystem trends.
Blockchain and Web3 Applications — SuiHub Athens — 28 May 2026 A side event at Panathēnea 2026 brought by the Sui Foundation, hosted at SuiHub Athens. An afternoon for founders, builders, developers, and VCs to connect, hear Web3 founder stories, and explore the latest Sui Foundation grants and programmes — followed by a cocktail hour. We’ll be there.
Blockchain and Trust Technologies — Common Prefix HQ — 29 May 2026 A side event at Panathēnea 2026 brought by Common Prefix x Pod Network, hosted at Common Prefix HQ in Athens. We’ll be there.
Berlin Blockchain Week — 13–21 June 2026 The 7th edition of Berlin’s community-organised blockchain week, spanning 90+ events across the city covering blockchain, AI, DeFi, and adjacent fields. A fixed anchor on the European Web3 calendar, anchored by DappCon (June 16–17) and Web3 Summit (June 18–19).
The Raven Day — 16 June 2026 · Berlin A BlackVogel-signature event during Berlin Blockchain Week. A full day in Berlin — starting with a 5K run at Tempelhofer Feld, co-working at Café Lulo, four afternoon panels covering regulation, adoption, impact, and ethics in tech, and closing with drinks and DJs into the evening. A more intentional format than the typical side event, worth putting on your calendar.
TOKEN2049 Singapore — 7–8 October 2026 The next edition of TOKEN2049 will take place at Marina Bay Sands, offering the global crypto community its next major gathering point of the year.
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