May has been a month of cautious momentum. Regulatory clarity is advancing faster than expected, institutional accumulation continues quietly in the background, and markets — despite mid-month volatility — are showing signs of stabilisation after a turbulent start to the year. For builders, the funding landscape remains cautious but active: ecosystems are deploying capital or credits, new programmes are launching, and the conference season is firmly underway.
Here’s your curated update for May
Here’s a fresh batch of funding opportunities for builders, researchers, and innovators in Web3:
Zcash Community Grants An open, rolling programme funding work across the full Zcash stack — wallets, shielded payment integrations, atomic swaps, stablecoins, light client infrastructure, and core developer tooling. Open to independent developers, teams, and researchers. Focus: Privacy & Security, Infra, DeFi, Dev Tooling, Public Goods
GUARDIANS Test-Before-Invest Open Call Supports small and medium-sized farms across Europe in replicating and validating digital solutions before full investment. Worth flagging for teams working at the intersection of tokenisation, supply chain transparency, or on-chain agricultural finance. Focus: Public Goods, EU
Injective x Microsoft Nova Program Billed as one of the largest programs of its kind, Nova backs builders at the frontier of AI and DeFi — with a focus on agent-native applications that generate real, repeat economic activity on Injective. Focus: AI, AIAgents, DeFi, Infra, Dev Tooling
GOAT AI Builder Grants Program The GOAT AI Builder Grants Program gives developers a structured path to funding for agent-native applications that create real, repeatable economic activity — built on Bitcoin. Focus: AI, AIAgents, DeFi, Infra, Dev Tooling
Tether Developer Grants Program Funding for developers building on Tether’s open stack — covering core libraries for QVAC, MDK, WDK, and Pears; decentralised and edge AI applications; peer-to-peer networking; and cryptography and open standards. Focus: AI, AIAgents, DeFi, Infra, Stablecoins & Payments, Dev Tooling
Circle Developer Grants Grants for exceptional teams building on Arc and the Circle stack — covering co-marketing, mentorship, and funding for DeFi, peer-to-peer payments, prediction markets, and lending and borrowing applications. Focus: AI, AIAgents, DeFi, Infra, Privacy & Security, Stablecoins & Payments, Dev Tooling
Stellar x CV Labs Accelerator Built for early-stage startups that have gained traction and are ready to scale — with a focus on DeFi, payments, and RWA teams based in EMEA or developing solutions for the region. Focus: Infra, DeFi, RWAs, Stablecoins & Payments
The Turing Test Hackathon 2026 Mantle’s flagship hackathon targeting the full AI x DeFi stack — from quant bots and macro-driven smart contracts to agentic wallets, viral DApps, and on-chain anomaly detection. All tracks run on Mantle’s infrastructure. Focus: AI, AIAgents, RWAs, dApps, Gaming, Infra, Privacy & Security, Public Goods, Stablecoins & Payments
A few things from this week worth reading together. Vitalik's latest post is worth reading carefully. In it, he laid out a leaner, more focused Ethereum Foundation, one that will reduce ETH sales, shrink its own footprint, and orient around what he called CROPS: censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security. The framing was deliberate: the EF as one node among many, not the centre of gravity. Separately, Optimism's Grants Council published its Season 9 Final Report: 38 applications reviewed across the season, roughly 2.85M OP deployed, and an AI filter now handling first-pass screening before human reviewers step in.
We were at Panathēnea last week in Athens and we joined the Sui Builder House at SuiHub Athens, an afternoon session built for founders, builders, and backers shipping in Web3. The programme covered Sui's ecosystem thesis — where the foundation is placing its bets across institutional DeFi, RWAs, stablecoin payment rails, and agentic commerce — alongside a clear breakdown of the founder support on offer: equity investment through Mysten Labs, the Moonshots liquidity programme for category-defining products, the Hydropower Accelerator, and ad hoc audit and co-marketing support. SuiHub Athens itself is worth flagging as a coworking space, genuinely very well set up.
The broader Panathēnea programme brought its own sharp moments — among them, Konstantinos Daskalakis from MIT, who put it plainly: algorithms are giving us addicted and polarized information, when they could be bridging the gap in our communication. The internet, he argued, is currently becoming garbage information but his prediction is that there will be a self-correction.
Plenty of excellent gatherings to meet other builders, show what you’re working on, and stay close to ecosystem trends.
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.
Blockchain and AI Conference 2026 — University of Malta — 23–25 September 2026. An interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Malta bringing together scholars, policymakers, technologists, and industry leaders to examine how blockchain and AI are reshaping governance, finance, law, identity, and civic participation. We attended last year and presented www.web3grants.co and can say it's one of those rare events where authentic engagement and meaningful content genuinely drive the programme, well beyond the buzzwords and marketing hype that dominate too many conferences in this space. Worth the trip to Valletta!
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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