Why Solidus Chases Grants Before a Token Sale or a Priced Round
The pricing pages in this track carry a status line up front (these are proposed commercial packages, not final contractual prices) and this page applies the same discipline to money coming in rather than money going out: nothing below is a raised amount, a signed term sheet, or a committed grant.
The sequencing choice, stated plainly
Given a choice between applying to non-dilutive grant programs and pursuing an accelerator's equity-priced check or a venture round, Solidus applies to the non-dilutive route first. Not exclusively, and not forever, but first, as a matter of sequencing rather than ideology. The generalized version of that preference is: apply broadly before committing narrowly, prefer non-dilutive capital while it's available, and incorporate around a specific instrument only when that instrument actually requires it, not in advance, on the theory that some future round might need a particular corporate shape.
That third piece matters as much as the first two and gets stated less often. Building out cap-table structure, multi-entity incorporation, or share-class complexity ahead of an actual signed instrument is a cost paid on spec, against a future that may not arrive in the shape anticipated. The reverse order, apply, get an actual offer, then incorporate to fit it, spends that structuring cost only when it's load-bearing.
Why non-dilutive capital, specifically, at this stage
A non-dilutive grant does not have that problem. It funds a specific, scoped piece of work, a standards implementation, a security audit, a protocol feature, without pricing the company as a whole, without setting a valuation that a later, better-informed round then has to beat, and without giving up equity for capital that was never priced against equity in the first place. That is the entire case, and it is a sequencing argument, not a claim that equity capital is bad or unnecessary: at some point a protocol this size needs a round priced by people willing to underwrite the whole thing, and this page does not pretend that need disappears. It argues only that grant capital should be exhausted, or at least seriously attempted, before that harder, more permanent trade is made.
The honest cost of this path
This is the part a pitch deck skips and this page won't. Grants are slower than an accelerator's Demo Day and a priced round's term sheet. They run on rolling, program-specific deadlines instead of a single fundraising sprint. Most applications, across most programs, do not convert: that is true of the category generically, not a Solidus-specific admission of failure, but it is still the honest baseline to state rather than imply otherwise. Writing a serious application is real work, done in parallel with everything else, for an outcome that is a coin flip at best per program and worse than that in aggregate. An accelerator's equity check, by contrast, is faster and more certain once accepted: that certainty is exactly what is being traded away by going the non-dilutive route first, and it is a real cost, not a rounding error.
Applications in progress are not funding received. Solidus has a non-dilutive proposal drafted, in the same spirit 097 describes for the NGI/NLnet landscape, an applicant, not a recipient, with nothing awarded. None of that has resulted in awarded funds as of this page. A reader should take the sequencing argument above as a stated strategy being executed, not a result being reported.
What this page is not claiming
Not a funding announcement. Not a claim that any specific program has said yes, or that any dollar figure, from a grant, an accelerator, or a round, has landed in an account. Not a cap-table disclosure of any kind; ownership structure isn't this page's subject and isn't shown here. The generalized principle above, apply-first, non-dilutive-first, incorporate-when-needed, is the sequencing logic being followed today, evaluated against results nowhere on this page, because there aren't any yet.
For the standards-credibility work this funding sequencing runs alongside, see /vision/standards-before-press; for a snapshot of the non-dilutive landscape this reasoning draws on, see /vision/ngi-funding-landscape-for-identity-infra. For the pricing hub this whole economics track sits under, see /economics/how-solidus-prices-verification; for the standing status every page here concedes to first, see /status.