Encode x Polkadot 2024 Programming

Dear Polkadot Community,

We are delighted to share our proposal for 2024 to build on years of work. 

Our first proposal via governance was 2021 here, for education, hackathons and accelerators. Last year we progressed this, kindly receiving funding for more education, 4 hackathons (including one at Decoded) and an online accelerator here.

We have just put in our final tranche request here for the 2023 proposal so we would like to move forward to planning for 2024. For 2023, our reports are all below:

Tranche 1: here

Tranche 2/3: here and here

Tranche 4: here

Tranche 5: here

We are so excited to continue our Polkadot work. We have seen 100s of hackathon projects built over our 6 hackathons together, seen VC-funded projects through our multiple accelerators and onboarded 1000s through our education workshops. We are very grateful for all the support we've received!

Our 2024 proposal is as follows:

• An 8-week education series
• A 4-week ink! bootcamp
• A 4-week online hackathon
• An 8-week accelerator
• Exposure in our in-person hacker house around the world
• Free talent support to any Polkadot ecosystem company, including via our Job Board, Career Fairs and Headhunting!

All details are in the deck attached here. We request funding of $385k split across 3 tranches of $128,333 in DOT (17,038.37 DOT based on Subscan 30 day MA of 7.532):

• Immediately
• One after 3 months (1st April)
• One after 6 months (1st July)