The Stacks Endowment has completed its review of Cycle 1 applications for the Stacks Ecosystem Grants program. Before announcing the selected teams, the team wanted to share the full picture of how this cycle was approached, because context matters and builders deserve more than a list of names.

Context

If you haven't read the Stacks Treasury Committee March 2026 community update, that's a good place to start. It explains where the Endowment is focused and why.

The short version: the TC aligned on a $7M reduction in annualized spend to protect a 24-month runway through uncertain market conditions. That constraint shaped the decision in this grant cycle on who would be funded, not the amount of funding. The clear focus areas are Bitcoin Staking, 100x chain capacity, AI agent infrastructure, and fast payments. The grants program exists to support builders contributing to those areas, and this cycle, the Grants Committee took that mandate seriously. In the next Q2 cycle, the focus areas may change. 

How Applications Were Evaluated

Every application was reviewed against a structured set of criteria designed to ensure capital is deployed in ways that align with ecosystem priorities and long-term growth.

At the core, applications were evaluated on strategic alignment with the Stacks roadmap, potential ecosystem impact, team strength and execution capacity, feasibility of the proposed scope, and budget reasonableness. Additional considerations included risk profile and the likelihood that the team would remain committed to building within the ecosystem over time.

For Builder Grants, the committee also looked for clear, verifiable indicators of progress and prioritized work that could deliver durable, long-term value rather than short-term activity.

Applications were assessed holistically, with decisions based on the overall strength of the proposal, the credibility of the team, and the likelihood that the work would translate into meaningful impact for the ecosystem.

Cycle 1 by the Numbers

This cycle drew significant interest from across the ecosystem and beyond. In total, the program received 325 applications:

• 67 Builder applications
• 258 Getting Started applications

From that pool, 18 teams were selected for this cycle, including 3 Builder grants and 15 Getting Started grants, with 1 Builder grant deferred to a future cycle and a small number of selected teams still completing final contracting steps before public announcement.

That level of competition meant many credible teams were not funded in this round. The result was not a lack of quality. It was a function of fit, sequencing, and capital discipline in a tighter cycle.That level of competition meant many credible teams were not funded in this round. The result was not a lack of quality. It was a function of fit, sequencing, and capital discipline in a tighter cycle.

The selected set skewed toward the areas the TC identified most clearly as priorities for this stage of ecosystem growth:

• 10 DeFi
• 3 Payments
• 3 AI
• 2 Analytics

What Was Funded

The TC's roadmap makes the priorities explicit: Bitcoin Staking, AI-agent-first infrastructure, fast and private payments, and DeFi growth. The selected cohort maps directly to those workstreams.

AI agents as economic participants. The TC's March update highlighted AI-agent-first development as a key focus, specifically by adding hooks and documentation so agents can interact with Stacks as easily as humans can. Several teams in this cohort are building that infrastructure, enabling agents to transact, coordinate, and perform work directly onchain. This creates a new source of demand that doesn't depend on traditional user growth.

Bitcoin payments infrastructure. There is still a need for fast, cheap, and private Bitcoin payments, and Stacks is mapping out how to deliver that. Selected teams in this area are working on the primitives that make Bitcoin genuinely usable for commerce, including micropayments, merchant flows, escrow, and streaming payments.

DeFi Growth. The focus here is not on more surface-layer apps. It is on the underlying primitives that improve liquidity, pricing mechanisms, and capital efficiency, forming the foundation that makes everything else composable. This also reflects the TC's emphasis on capital efficiency: reducing LP spend that isn't yielding strategic returns while building the infrastructure that does.

These areas are intentionally interconnected. Payments move value, AI generates activity, and lastly, DeFi makes capital productive. The result is a system that sustains itself.

Where the Cycle Stands Today

Most of the selected grants are already moving through contracting and launch preparation. A small number are still completing final administrative and contracting steps before they can be publicly announced.

For teams that were not selected but submitted especially compelling applications, the work does not necessarily stop here. Some teams will be contacted directly about next steps, including future grant consideration and other ecosystem pathways being built out to support earlier-stage founders.

Teams Not Selected This Cycle

Many promising teams applied in areas that the committee was unable to fund this cycle. For applicants who were not selected but stood out in the process, reapplying for Q2 may not be necessary. Those teams will be contacted directly with the next steps as the next cycle opens. Other teams are welcome to apply again in Q2 if their work remains relevant to the upcoming cycle’s priorities.

Developer tooling was one of the areas that surfaced particularly compelling submissions that the committee wants to revisit. The TC's roadmap explicitly names Clarinet, Stacks.js, mobile libraries, and Extended API as active investment areas from Stacks Labs. A refined approach to tooling grants is coming in Q2.

Creator tools and retail consumer applications were not selected in this cycle. These categories are a critical part of a healthy ecosystem, but their success depends heavily on the maturity of the underlying infrastructure.

Given current priorities, the focus was on investing in foundational layers that enable transactions, coordination, and capital efficiency. As those systems become more robust, the ecosystem will be better positioned to support and scale consumer and creator applications in future cycles.

DeGrants: Community and Culture Funding

Education, events, and community-driven initiatives have always been part of what makes the Stacks ecosystem worth building in. That support is moving into its own dedicated home.

The DeGrants program will reopen in late H1 2026. The Stacks Endowment is taking this time to reduce operational complexity and bring on community stewards who will serve as the selection committee. This structure is intentional: decisions about community and culture funding should be made by people embedded in the community itself, not by a centralized review process. More details on the timeline and how to get involved as a steward will be shared in the coming weeks.

What We Learned from Cycle 1

Cycle 1 made one thing very clear: there is real demand for ecosystem funding, and the program needs to keep improving to meet that demand well.

A few lessons stood out immediately. First, applicants need better visibility into where they are in the process, especially across the review, selection, and contracting stages. Second, communication and timeline expectations need to be clearer throughout the cycle. Third, tighter track definitions and earlier filtering would help reduce misalignment, especially for teams applying to the Builder track before they are actually at that stage.

This cycle also reinforced the value of having more explicit themes. When a round is tied to a narrower strategic focus, it becomes easier for founders to assess whether their work is a fit, and easier for the committee to make sharper allocation decisions.

Future cycles will build on those lessons by improving processes, communication, transparency, and coordination across the broader builder support ecosystem.

A Note to Everyone Who Applied

Building through this cycle has required patience from the whole community, and that hasn't gone unnoticed. Tighter budgets and a market that hasn't yet rewarded the work are real. Every builder in this ecosystem has felt it.

Every application submitted reflects time and genuine belief in what this ecosystem is becoming. That shapes Stacks regardless of what any single grants cycle selects. Tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin capital are seeking a productive home, and Stacks is the only project with the on-chain history, technical infrastructure, and regulatory standing to capture it. What builders are creating now, across payments, agent infrastructure, and DeFi depth, is what makes that possible.

The full list of selected teams is below. Milestone details for funded projects are already live in the grants tracker.

Builder Grants

Night Owl by Bitflow
Building a CEX/DEX arbitrage processor that helps align onchain pricing on Stacks with broader market rates and strengthens price efficiency across the ecosystem.

Signal21
Building data analytics infrastructure for Stacks through dashboards, research, APIs, and ecosystem insights that improve transparency and support data-driven growth.

Zero Authority
Enhancing the Zero Authority platform through grants system development, infrastructure improvements, design upgrades, and AI-assisted user experiences across core ecosystem modules.

Getting Started Grants

BigMarket
Building a decentralized prediction market platform on Stacks and upgrading it into a more scalable, production-ready trading system with future cross-chain expansion in mind.

FlashStack
Building flash loan infrastructure on Stacks to support more advanced DeFi execution and capital efficiency.

FlowVault
Building programmable vault primitives that developers can use to create more advanced asset flows and onchain coordination.

SatoshiYield
Building a yield aggregation and vault interface to help users compare, manage, and deploy capital across Stacks DeFi opportunities.

sBTC Pay
Building merchant payment tooling that makes it easier to accept Bitcoin-native payments through Stacks.

sBTC Escrow
Building escrow infrastructure for peer-to-peer and commercial transactions that require conditional release of funds.

ShadowFeed
Building a decentralized data marketplace on Stacks where feeds can be published, discovered, and monetized for agent and application consumption.

Stacks Agent Protocol
Building infrastructure for registering, powering, and monetizing onchain agents and agent-native interactions.

Stacks Stablecoin Engine
Building collateralized stablecoin infrastructure on Stacks, including vaults, liquidations, and core stability mechanisms

Stacks Strategy Protocol
Building programmable token and liquidity primitives on Stacks for more structured launches and treasury-aware market strategies.

StacksPot
Building onchain participation and pot-based coordination mechanics on Stacks through new formats designed to drive more active user engagement and transaction activity.

StackStream
Building token streaming infrastructure on Stacks for teams, DAOs, and users to manage programmable onchain payments.

VelumX
Building gasless transaction infrastructure on Stacks that lets users pay fees in SIP-010 tokens instead of STX.

VoltFi
Building a gold yield vault on Stacks that combines stablecoin deposits, transparent accounting, and onchain distribution.

x402 Stacks
Building payment and monetization infrastructure on Stacks for APIs, services, and other programmable internet-native payment flows.