Hack Grants

We give small grants on the order of $200 - $1000 for ambitious projects in the fields of hard science and open source. For asks from $1000 - $5000, we can connect you to larger funders. We also can grant compute between $1,000 to $20,000 (or more) based on the project’s needs.
The grants program is open all year. We only ask that you make as much of your work as public and open as possible, including all code. We strive to have a fast turnaround time (so far, our median has been ~24 hours), inspired by Fast Grants. We believe encouraging open science is the best way to accelerate both open source technological innovation and young scientists to solve the world’s biggest problems.

For Prospective Grantees

Email hoorays_redbuds01@icloud.com with a few lines about your project, and what you will use the funding for. Please include links to your public profiles/websites/project, and a deadline for funding.
We prioritize people who are rebellious, scrappy, and creative, and who love doing side projects. We will prioritize projects that have no other avenues of receiving funding by their deadline, projects with smaller grant asks, and younger applicants. We prioritize weird, hard tech, and hardware projects. We especially encourage high schoolers and people from traditionally underrepresented groups to apply.

For Prospective Funders

The fastest way to give is to send USDC/DAI to our Ethereum mainnet address: 0xaF96772a6329bbD697A062740E25D2FA53198256
You can also give to our 501c3 for tax benefits here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/av-grants. We do not permit funders to attach any strings to their money. They (the same as anyone else) are free to suggest projects to fund. We will only update funders via updating this site in real time with the list of funded projects and their goals. Funders who express specific interests may be contacted (at their discretion) with additional projects that might fit their profile well.

Funded Projects

We have given no-strings-attached grants to (and subsequently participated in) these projects:
  • Neural Imagery: Novel, fully open-source TD fNIRS device (hardware, software, tomography, machine learning) that uses bespoke models to reconstruct your visual imagination directly from your occipital lobe.
  • PLUME: Grants to open source contributors to make improvements and integrate a new cryptographic signature into wallets (ERC 7524) that enables zero knowledge voting, anonymous proof of solvency, and anonymous message board moderation on Ethereum keys.
  • MIT Soul and Coursetexts: Projects that open-source full courses from MIT and Harvard, with fast turnaround time. Manifesto here.
  • Proteus: A design for a perceptual hash-based system in order to determine content source for camera-taken vs AI generated images.
  • Monolith: Cheaper open-source high-channel EEG devices. Reduce the price of high quality, multi-channel open source EEG from thousands of dollars to hundreds via price-optimized PCBs, far cheaper than OpenBCI’s. Currently machines that are hundreds of dollars usually only have 2-6 channels.
  • Cudanexus: Deploy the latest image-based open source machine learning models to have a simple API and user interface. Over 6,000 runs of deployed models.
  • Project Sonus: Building an inexpensive replacement for MRI by using ultrasound and full waveform inversion (FWI), along with the first ever open source codebase.
  • RNA Backbone: Flow + point attention machine learning algorithms for generative RNA backbone design, critical for new RNA therapeutics.
  • Science Engineering Squad: A new group that takes the most important open source scientific software out of academic research (such as fusion simulation calculations), and make it way easier to use. Currently, critical packages don’t even compile, and they aren’t configurable nor easily editable. We think we can accelerate science by fixing this.
  • Communities
    • Socratica: Open coworking sessions across the world for for friendly, ambitious nerds with high effort passion projects.
    • The Kitchen: Free coworking space in Waterloo for project exploration.
 

Funded Mischief

We have funded various playful explorations and communities as well, generally by smaller amounts.
  • MIT Mischief Fund: A secret □□□□□ □□□□ to □□□□□□□ □□□□□□□ □□□□□□□-□□□□□□□ projects □□ □□□□□□, including □□□□□□ □□□□□□□□.
 

Projects With Grants Open

These bounties are open for implementations.
  • ZK Data Guilds: A sybil-resistant mechanism for public goods funding via private data ownership and community monetization of data sharing/ad watching.