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Lightning Grants AMA: Funding at the Speed of Ideas
Recorded: June 30, 2025 Duration: 0:13:21Space Recording
Short Summary
Exciting developments in the crypto ecosystem as the Lightning Grants program launches, offering up to $20,000 in funding to innovative builders. This initiative aims to streamline the grant application process, providing timely support and resources to help bring new projects to market.
Full Transcription
Thank you. you
clearly Hey, yes, yes, yes, yes.
I'm going to invite you to co-host. Thank you. All right.
All right.
All right.
All right.
Oh, gosh. That right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right.
All right.
Oh, gosh.
That was a great echo.
I think we'll maybe give it like, yeah, a couple more minutes,
and then we can kick off.
Hello, everyone in the crowd.
We have Yo, Deca.
How's it going?
Sneha, Adicha, Mantelatam, Hola.
Let's give some hearts, just so I don't feel crazy. Okay. Thank you. so yeah i i have john with me here um he's gonna be speaking from my
my account he's literally right next to me right at con so we're
just uh we're irl hello everybody hey deca hey santi hey everybody i'm kelly kim today
all right let me just uh quickly do a little reminder and then we'll kick off
quickly do a little reminder and then we'll kick off
Ben how are you this morning?
All good all good there it is 9am where I am so fresh start to the day and the week
Lovely. We all know you're a morning person, so that's good.
lovely we all know you're a morning person so that's good
Sure. So-called morning person.
Yeah. For anyone listening, Ben is really lovely in the morning, so it's his favorite time of the day.
Okay. I'm just going to pin the announcement here, and then I think we're good so this is uh this is recorded so if you're um
unable to make it I'm sure you're listening to this now just go ahead and um have fun with
the recording otherwise um yeah I think we're good okay so I think let's just kick off with some, some intros.
I'll begin.
You know, I'm Kelly.
I just realized I'm the only one without a Mantle logo, but that's fine.
Yeah, I, I work for Mantle, mostly leading and I guess like operating builder programs.
So if any of you have taken part in the cook-a-thon, yep, we're cooking here.
And also with Lightning Grants, Sozu House, and any, I guess, accelerators that we take part in.
I try to make sure everything goes to plan and swiftly.
And yeah, that's basically me. I'll hand it over to Ben
Hey, thanks for that. I'm sorry I'm going to hand it over to John first. But anyway, thanks for taking time everybody. Good morning to anyone who's in the morning. Good afternoon to those in Europe and good evening to those in Asia. I've been part of Mento for one and a half years now.
I'm in BD, we do a bunch of things. So BD, go to market, basically ecosystem overall.
And also I'm the intern of Zero X Mento Latam.
So, glad to be here, excited to see what's going to happen with our newest program.
Maybe, John, introduction for yourself.
Hello. Thank you, Ben.
Yeah, I'm John. I've been part of Mantle for quite some time now. Joined very early on.
Yeah, really early. And yeah, I'm just
basically slaving away
on the developer experience side of things.
I generally love learning about what you guys are building
and oftentimes kind of really hands-on.
If you need a co-architect of whatever you're building,
please feel free to reach out.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm happy to be part of this AMA
and happy to help you guys with
learning about Lightning Grants and just in general in the future, kind of supporting
builders in this ecosystem. Back to Kelly.
Awesome. I guess, you know, thanks everyone for joining us today. This is a really,
it's going to be a really quick AMA session
because Lightning Grants is actually designed to be very simple
and very easy to understand.
So mainly this is just to reiterate the points that we outlined in the announcement.
So in a nutshell, we're really excited to present Lightning Grants,
which is, yeah, like a very lightweight
grants program. The reason Lightning Grants came to life was, you know, like in the industry,
there are so many hackathons, like so many ways to like get in, you know, into the weeds as a
builder. But most of these are, you know, very upper upper funnel and we found that like there are so many builders
with so many ideas many mvps from yeah all these programs like hackathons but it's like the gap
between that and say like an accelerator where you can really focus on taking your your idea or
your product to market is quite difficult.
And so usually what's missing is just that little bit of extra runway.
We know that many people want to go into this full time,
but just maybe don't have the means right now.
So in order to change that, we introduced Lightning Grants,
which are grants up to 20K.
And we review them weekly so you don't have to wait for months to hear back.
We know, you know, infamously grants programs take way, way longer than they should.
And we know that many ideas kind of get buried.
So this is kind of our attempt to give back to you guys for being so innovative and building relentlessly.
And yeah, that's basically it.
We're going to go through the process, also what we're looking for.
We're going to address some of the questions that you dropped in the AMA announcements and then hopefully by the end of this you'll have a very good idea of
what exactly it takes to to be successful and
to get funded
Ben, do you want to maybe really quickly go through sort of the the mechanics of this grant program, you know, like
How to apply, you know, and how to follow follow through yeah yeah thanks kelly so
the lightning grants essentially we have a few grants programs so we have one internal where
it's a very special case kind of uh grant it can be a bit bigger size we have the scout program
where there'll be some thought leaders that come and share
with us of the projects that we're building and give them a grant.
But we realized some of the early stage teams might not have all the contacts or might not
have the easiest way to reach out to some of our so-called Scouts.
So what we did was we came up with this program for Kelly, John, myself and a girl Hannah and
Brian as well who's here in the call. So we decided and of course one of our OT members, our lead,
Veer, so we came up with this idea like okay let's make this very quick and simple. So the process
is very simple. You go to the website which is on the link above. So go to the website, which is on the link above.
So go to the website, lightning.mentor.xyz, and you just quickly fill up a form.
It takes you less than 10 minutes to apply.
You just have to send in your GitHub a quick video of, like a loop video of what you're
building.
And then from there, we'll take a look. Literally just before I call Kelly, John and myself were looking through the application on announcement
that we made and now we're shortlisting teams and then by end of the week you'll get like
a message from them or somebody will reach out to you and say hey whether it's like feedback or whether it's approval or whether we might need some more information.
And yes, it's up to 20k, not necessarily 20k.
It can be somewhere between $1,000 to $20,000.
Depends on the size of the team, depends on how far you've built your product so far,
whether it's new, whether it's been here for a while,
all this kind of stuff we take into account.
Of course, we would be very, very,
what the other shit my English story in the morning.
It is very, like, we take into account a lot of things
before we decide how much we want to give you.
But we are also rational and not going to...
It's not going to be like $100, right?
It's going to be like a proper amount where we can incentivize you to build on top of Manto.
And your product can be multi-chain.
We don't have an issue with multi-chain.
Multi-chain is the future until Interop is solved.
So yeah, it doesn't have to be the only mental native project, it could be a multi-chain.
But of course there are certain things we'll go through and then once you get that $5,000
or $20,000 or however much money we give to you, we will sit down and talk about milestones
and what kind of milestones we need to you. We will sit down and talk about milestones and what kind of
milestones we need to achieve upon receiving the grant.
Sweet. Yeah, so yeah, everything Ben said. It's just such an easy application. I don't
think it needs too much explanation. The website is lightning.grants.xyz.
Um, I actually want to like hand it over to John real quick because he, he like kind of not vibe coded.
He actually just built this website in like a day and, um, it's as simple as the process.
So maybe John, if you want to like run through what your thought process was behind this,
if you design engineered.
Hey, yeah.
Um, yeah.
