The Obol Grants Program Is Now Live

The Obol Grants Program is designed to support the Obol Collective’s growth and reward individuals for their contributions. 

Earlier this year, we launched a pilot version of the Obol Grants Program to explore how we could support contributors aligned with the Collective’s goals. That pilot funded three impactful projects and helped us design a more scalable and transparent funding structure.

Today, we’re excited to officially launch the Obol Grants Program: an open, milestone-based funding framework to support the Obol Collective’s growth across infrastructure, governance, and community.

If you’re building on Distributed Validators, running community events, or contributing to Obol in any way, this program is for you.

🔗 Check out the full docs

Supporting the Obol Collective’s Contributors

The Obol Grants Program is designed to support meaningful contributions across the Obol Collective. That could include anything from scaling Distributed Validators, to building technical features, to expanding education and empowering community-led initiatives.

This program allows us to extend the Obol Collective’s reach by tapping into the talent and energy of the broader ecosystem. We’re fortunate to have an engaged community and the program gives us a way to encourage collaboration, unlock creativity, and ship valuable initiatives. 

The program offers three distinct grant tracks. In doing so, it offers people clear pathways to contribute based on their skills and interests, whether that’s running meetups, building tooling, or picking up scoped missions we’ve curated. All funding is milestone-based and traceable onchain, ensuring a balance between accountability, scalability, and aligned growth. 

Three Dedicated Grant Tracks

After gathering feedback from contributors and learning from the pilot wave, we’re introducing three focused tracks to better match funding with different types of contributions:

1. Staking Masters

This track is the evolution of our Staking Mastery Program, restructured into a rolling basis model. It’s designed for teams or individuals looking to proactively contribute to any of the Collective’s SQUAD goals. These proposals are milestone-based and reviewed on a rolling basis. All applicants must outline their suggested scope, deliverables, and a requested budget denominated in USD (to be paid in the OBOL Token).

📌 Successful examples may include integrating stOBOL into DeFi protocols, conducting technical research and infrastructure improvements, deepening DV penetration into (re)staking protocols, expanding institutional usage of DVs, or creating more utility for the OBOL Token.

2. Community Events

This track provides a permissionless framework to support in-person events, workshops, and educational sessions focused on Obol Distributed Validators. We offer two types of retroactive funding:

• Food and Drink Budget: $15 per verified attendee for up to 100 attendees
• Conversion Bonus: 0.1% of net new validator TVL launched via your event

All events must be verified through material like event photos, receipts, presentations, and X recap threads. For conversions, the validator’s Ethereum address must submit onchain verification. 

📌 Successful examples may include hosting Obol DV onboarding meetups, workshops, or local educational sessions.

3. Open Strategic Missions

In this track, we will publish technical projects for community members to “pick up” and complete to receive milestone-based funding. 

Each mission will include a brief, a proposed budget, and guidance on how to apply. We will review every submission to ensure fit and technical proficiency before giving the go-ahead to proceed with a task. 

📌 Successful examples may include adding an “add-validator” feature in Dappnode, building Ansible playbooks, or prototyping extra security features for DV clusters using trusted execution environments. Each mission will include a brief, a proposed budget, and guidance on how to apply. We will review every submission to ensure fit and technical proficiency before giving the go-ahead to proceed with a task. In this track, we will publish technical projects for community members to “pick up” and complete to receive milestone-based funding. 3. Open Strategic Missions

How It Works

• Milestone-Based Funding: All grants will be issued with OBOL Tokens based on milestone completion and approval. Funding will always be negotiated in USD-equivalent terms.
• 7-Day Triage: All submissions will receive an initial review within seven business days. At the end of the review, submissions will either be approved, declined, or flagged for further discussion.
• Transparency: All funded projects will be tracked publicly on Questbook, with onchain funding visible and a recap shared via Obol’s social channels.

Rolling Submissions: There will not be any application deadlines, so you can apply at any time.

What We’ve Funded So Far

The pilot wave supported three strong initiatives:

1. Curia Lab built the Delegate Reputation Score oracle and dashboard for our governance system.
2. DAMM Finance completed research on DeFi integrations (Pendle, Morpho) for stOBOL.
3. Vista launched a governance-focused Dune dashboard tracking delegate activity and voting power.

📰 Learn more in our Pilot Phase Wrap-Up

Get Involved

The Obol Grants Program launch unlocks new paths for contributors to get involved and we’re excited to support your work. Whether you’re a developer, researcher, or community organizer, we’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in working on something that aligns with our mission.  

💬 Got questions or ideas? Ping us in Discord.

Let’s keep building together.