The Sia Foundation Grants Program was formed in 2022, and, now three years later, there is a need to reflect on the program and its processes, and identify potential areas for revision to improve grantee, Committee, and Foundation team experience.
The bulk of this review of the Grants Program was composed of predominantly stakeholder surveying, in the form of one-on-one interviews and a community survey, which took place from July to November 2025. Feedback and thoughts on the current state of the Grants Program and potential areas for improvement were solicited from:
- 15 Foundation team members*
- 17 Community Survey respondents**, Grants Committee members*, and current or recent grantees (some of whom already serve more than one function in the Sia community)**
*there is overlap here given three Foundation staff members serve on the Committee
**there is potential overlap between the survey respondents and the grantees who agreed to interviews
There was almost unanimous agreement from internal and external stakeholders that there needs to be:
- More higher quality projects accepted into the program
- Increased focus on measurable outcomes for the program, with increased data collection and project tracking, and the development of set Grants Program Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Increased project structure and support throughout the program as well as post-program
- Increased process scrutiny, improvements, and documentation:
- Improvements will need to be made to grantee GitHub repository organization, monthly progress & final reporting (featuring greater milestone alignment), and the technical review process
- A standard operating procedure for the Grants Program will need to be finalized
- Documentation needs to be consolidated for the Program and its administration especially when it comes to the Grants Committee and its meetings
- The proposal matrix scoring used by the Grants Committee needs to be revisited
- Clearer regular communication and transparency 1) internally about the Program, and 2) externally with grantees and the community about guidelines, expectations, and governance practices
- Increased program marketing and outreach efforts
- Greater engagement (internally and externally) with the program, which could stem from:
- Improvements to the monthly check-in process with grantees
- Changes to the Grant Committee meeting structure, committee composition , etc.
- More concentrated efforts to get community involvement in the program
Some additional views not wholly unanimous, or not necessarily within scope for the Grants Program, included:
- Finding more opportunities to talk up the current active projects more by posting visual summaries of the progress reports in a low noise dev board (like a Kanban)
- Considering retroactive grants and compensation for Committee members
- Especially as we hope to attract more quality builders and the Committee will be expected to increase their commitment and involvement
- Driving Community Engagement through the return of hackathons
- Implementing a bounty or micro grants program
Recommendations
To directly address the aforementioned feedback and modest program metrics, and steer the Grants Program to have better impact, here are some proposed preliminary recommendations.
NOTE: This does not guarantee that the Grants Program will install any and all of the below recommendations, but these items are being raised for discussion and for transparency with the community on some of the current thinking around the future of the program.
For immediate effect:
- Audit and clean-up all public-facing information platforms (i.e. Global Grants Program | Sia webpage, the Forum, GitHub) and complete a reorganization of the internal information repositories (i.e. Notion, Google Drive), so all public-facing and internal touchpoints for information on the Grants Program and its administration are coherent and cohesive
- Include Grants Program updates at the monthly internal Team meetings and make more frequent posts on the Forum – and share across Discord – about the state of the Grants Program
- Revisit the proposal matrix and edit the format and process to allow for proper Grants Committee member engagement, while still satisfying audit requirements for proposal assessment.
For consideration in 2026 and beyond:
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Overhaul the monthly technical review process and assessment criteria to give clearer guidelines and greater confidence for technical reviews to the Engineering team
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Re-evaluate the efficacy and membership of the Grants Committee:
- Consider member longevity and makeup in anticipation of new agreements needing to be in place by July 2026
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Make sizeable changes to the Grants Program guidelines, standards, and approach:
- Develop a one-year to three-year strategy for the Program including a situational analysis, Key Performance Indicators, and goal posts for sustainable scaling (internal staffing capacity, resource allocation, etc.)
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Test opportunities for greater community engagement, such as:
- Encouraging more community feedback on proposals through cross-posting grant proposals on Discord or post more summarized versions of the grant applications in the #general-sia Discord channel to have the Community discuss and upvote as a way to gauge general community sentiment
- A Grants Program Office Hours
- Cadence to be determined but could try quarterly to start
- Invite current and past grantees in addition to anyone interested in the Grants Program
- Design the time to help grantees to communicate and engage better with each other and the community; and for community members to ask questions about the Grants Program, share skills and resources, and to promote their own projects.
- With a format that’s a mix of sharing around a theme and open Q&A, potential themes could be:
- Grants Do’s and Don’ts
- Something I wish others knew about my project…
- When I first started my grant I wish I knew…
- Thinking about what happens beyond the Grants Program…
- Hosted on Discord or Google Meet (with the potential to develop more grantee engagement activities in a space like Gather?)
- Will need to take into account potential scheduling difficulties, language barriers, and capacity for Foundation team support.
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Work with Marketing and Engineering to determine who the ideal grantees are (target personas for the program) and to build outreach and marketing campaigns
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Explore platform partners for a cleaner onboarding experience for grantees, and easier collection of data analytics and insights
- Could also provide more key information on how projects translate to ecosystem impact
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Assess ways to potentially collaborate with partners to provide an onramp to our program with complementary values and coverage in privacy and data storage adjacent areas
- There is an opportunity here to divert projects that are a good fit for Sia to feed the Grants Program
Conclusion
As a result of this review, the Grants Program will enter a new phase in 2026 with the debut of a focused program strategy and metrics for success. The ultimate goal of this new phase is professionalizing, streamlining, and revitalizing the program in order to attract higher quality grant applications, which should ultimately provide potential for high technical impact on the network and usability for established and new Sia community members.
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Appendix - Program by the Numbers:
Full Culminative Program Stats - as of December 8, 2025:
Annual Breakdown: 2022 - 2025:
Program Budget vs Spending:
Generally the trend has been the Grants Program has not been spending its full budgeted amount annually.
Here is a breakdown of the budgeted values vs. actual spending for 2021 to 2025:
| 2021 Budget | 2021 Actual | 2022 Budget | 2022 Actual | 2023 Budget | 2023 Actual | 2024 Budget | 2024 Actual | 2025 Budget | 2025 Actual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.00 | 35,032.43 | 1,000,000 | 363,893.46 | 1,000,000 | 652,590.54 | 1,250,000 | 741,536.03 | 1,000,000 | 417,243.67 |
Spending for 2021 is included, even though it predates the Grants Program, because there was an instance where the Board reviewed and approved one grant to Handy Host.
Note: between 2022-23, some grant funds were disbursed in SiaCoins (SC) but as of 2024, the policy shifted so grant funding can only be disbursed in USD.
The disparity between the program’s budgeted and actual values can be explained by a number of factors, namely:
- Increase in proposal scrutiny by the Grants Committee
- Policy shift to disperse USD only
- Improved clarity on the proposal and reporting expectations and scrutiny on milestone completion from the Foundation Team and Grants Committee
Regardless, the program’s budget is not in line with its actual spending and there is definitely room for growth. In 2026, the proposed program budget is $500,000 to allow time for program administrative and strategic changes to take effect, and resulting in higher quality projects the Committee will fund.