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Announcing AT Protocol Grants

· 3 min read

We’re excited to announce the AT Protocol Grants program, aimed at fostering the growth and sustainability of the atproto developer ecosystem.

In the first iteration of this program, we’ll distribute a total of $10,000 in microgrants of $500 to $2,000 per project based on factors like cost, usage, and more.

To apply for a grant, please fill out this form.​

Program Details​

Over the last few months, we’ve seen independent developers create projects ranging from browser extensions and clients to PDS implementations and atproto tooling. Many of them have become widely adopted in the Bluesky community, too! As we continue on our path toward sustainability, we’re launching this grants program to encourage and support developers building on the AT Protocol.

We will be distributing a total of $10,000, and will publicly announce all grant recipients. We have already distributed $3,000, and the recipients of those grants are detailed below. This is a rolling application, though we will announce when all $10,000 of the initial allocated amount has been distributed.

We’ll evaluate each application based on the submitted project plan and the potential impact. The project should be useful to some user group, whether its fellow developers or Bluesky users. To be eligible for a grant, your project must be open source. We pay out grants via public GitHub Sponsorships.

In addition, we’ve also partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer $5,000 in AWS Activate1 credits to atproto developers as well. These credits are applied to your AWS bill to help cover costs from cloud services, including machine learning, compute, databases, storage, containers, dev tools, and more. Simply check a box in your atproto grant application if you’re interested in receiving these credits as well.

Initial AT Protocol Grant recipients​

Ahead of Bluesky’s public launch in February, Bluesky PBC extended grants to three developers as a pilot program. We awarded $1,000 each to the following projects and developers:

AT Protocol Python SDK — Ilya Siamionau

AT Protocol Dart SDK — Shinya Kato

Listed on the homepage of the Bluesky API documentation site, these two SDKs have quickly become popular packages with atproto developers. We’re also especially impressed by their own documentation sites!

SkyFeed — redsolver

SkyFeed has helped bring Bluesky’s vision for custom feeds to life — now, there are more than 40,000 custom feeds that users can subscribe to, and a vast majority of them are built with SkyFeed.

Contact​

We’re excited to continue to find ways to help developers make their projects built on atproto sustainable. Again, you can submit an application for an AT Protocol grant here.

Please feel free to leave questions or comments on the GitHub discussion for this announcement here.

Footnotes​

  1. AWS Activate Credits are subject to the program's terms and conditions. ↩