General Terms & Conditions
We have structured our grants and incentives programs to promote growth and innovation within Nova Network, as well as to help us on laying the foundation and basic infrastructure required for the efficient functioning of our public ledger.
For the Nova Network to achieve its goals with the grant programs, we have tailored the General Terms & Conditions below to publicly establish the aimed-for relationship between Network and the network's established projects under these programs.
a) All grant applications will have to be submitted through our official forms, and applications coming from anywhere else will be immediately dismissed.
b) Applications will be assessed using disclosed and undisclosed criteria, with the main reason being to avoid targeted applications attempting to circumvent Nova Network in bad-faith..
c) Upon receiving a valid grant application, we will assess the submitted information and strive to reach a decision within 14 days from the application's submission date.
d) All official communication regarding grant applications will happen via email. This doesn't mean that direct conversations cannot happen elsewhere between the Nova Network's team and the applicant.
e) All grants are paid in SNT tokens in our native network, unless expressively stated otherwise in your grant approval letter.
f) Grant payments are done to a shared bridging wallet, from where the project will be able to further withdraw the funds and use them for the intended purposes.
We will only approve a grant application if we are confident you will be able to deliver on your project, and maintain it after it has been deployed. But despite our best efforts, we still need to make sure that in case you fail to deliver, we will be able to mitigate any direct or indirect damages / loses arising from the non-completion or abandonment of the project. Therefore, all our grants are subject to the guarantees outlined below.
Code Sharing
We do not require your code to be open-source, but we do require to have access to it up to the date our grants program is finished, with all milestones achieved. This gives us material and concrete guarantee that we can either open-source or outsource the code to someone else in the community in case you fail to deliver to expectations or abandon the project.
Staged Payments
We split the grant's payouts in at least 4 different stages, each one representing one milestone, with metrics and requirements set by our team, which can be found in your approval letter. Up to the moment that the last stage is paid out, we reserve the right to cancel or suspend your grant without any previous notice. The mechanism to pause/adjust for projects that are not up to the desired standard and/or not reflective of the initial approved proposal criteria allows the Nova Network team to ensure proper alignment between Grant Funds and project work that is being funded.
Intellectual Property and Copyright
By not completing the project within the established timeframe, failing to address serious bugs or potential security flaws, abandoning the project unfinished, or abandoning the project after it enters production and within less than 12 months from the last grant stage payment, will automatically entitle Nova Network to take over your project's source, cease any pending payments, and seize all the copyrighted material and intellectual property associated with the project and the grant, making Nova Network the sole retainer of such intellectual property and copyrighted material, whilst making you and your team impeded of using such source elsewhere without being subject to copyright infringement.
Information shared between the applicant and Nova Network are not to be shared with any public, person, or group of people, without previous written consent from the counterparty that originally owns or have disclosed that information. This doesn't apply to public known information.
No party shall use any of the exchanged information for their own personal benefit, including, but not limited to, using privileged information to front-run trades and operate on the open market.
a) Grant applicants understand that there will be no shared liability with Nova Network, nor will it be any kind of official linkage between Nova Network and the project in what concerns the development, maintenance, and operating of their own platforms.
b) Nova Network does not offer security or collateral to any other service providers that decide to engage with the project.
c) Nova Network will not be liable for any damages or losses caused by usage or operation of the platforms, products, and services developed by the project to which a grant was issued, being these a result of direct mismanagement, security flaws, scams, or any other conceivable circumstance.
d) Unless authorised by Nova Network, the project shall not refer to the grant relationship as a partnership, or use Nova Network's name and brand to market the project in a way that would lead to the understanding that Nova Network directly endorses it.
e) Nova Network will not be liable to pay for any damage or losses incurred by the project in case it decides to suspend the grant, hold payment, or break ties with it. It's the project's sole responsibility to ensure its solvency, as well as to take up full responsibility for its operations, development, and maintenance.
f) Nova Network will not refund, reimburse, or repay any expenses incurred by the project in the development of its own platforms, products, and services, and the project will be solely responsible for the allocation of the proceeds from the grant, within that making sure that it has the means to pay any expenses that will not be covered by it.
To better manage grant applications, we have sectorised our grants in four different programs:
- Innovation & Infrastructure
- Continuous Development
- Sponsored Partnerships
- Native Liquidity
Each program is tailored to fulfill a specific market need and streamline the application process, so the funding process is fast-tracked for those who need it the most, or for those offering integrations that we consider to be highly desirable.
Also to streamline the application process, funding applications have been split into 6 distinct tiers, each one with a different funding ceiling. Lower-tiered funding applications are often fast-tracked, whilst larger allocations will often require more due diligence at our end before a grant is approved and issued to the applicant.
- Tier 0 Funding, ≤ SNT 50,000 (Fast-tracked)
- Tier 1 Funding, ≤ SNT 100,000 (Fast-tracked)
- Tier 2 Funding, ≤ SNT 250,000
- Tier 3 Funding, ≤ SNT 500,000
- Tier 4 Funding, ≤ SNT 750,000
- Tier 5 Funding, ≤ SNT 1,000,000
Having different funding tiers allows us to process applications quickly for certain types of funding, whilst also allowing access to deeper liquidity for more complex and comprehensive applications.