Grants ·
Round 7 is about payments people actually use
Why we picked wallets and checkouts, and what a strong application looks like.
Amara Okafor
Grants, council · 4 min read
Round 7 of the builder grants will fund wallets, checkouts, on-ramps and payment APIs, with a $3.2M pool and grants from $25k to $250k. The budget goes to a token holder vote in October. If it passes, applications open straight after and close on 12 Dec 2026.
Why payments
Oriel was built so that a coffee costs less than a cent to pay for and settles before the receipt prints. The teams that use it that way are growing fastest. Tessel has 140,000 wallets, Paywire serves 2,300 shops and Tillpoint 900 stores, and none of them existed before 2023.
Round 6 spread its money across many categories. This time we want most of it to go to the things people pay with every day.
What we want to see
- Checkout in one tap: a payment button a shop can add in an afternoon.
- Wallets for first-timers: sign-up with a passkey, recovery without a seed phrase.
- Local on-ramps: cash or bank transfer to ORL in markets we don't reach yet.
- Payouts at scale: payroll and marketplace payouts to thousands of wallets.
What a strong application looks like
The best applications in round 6 were short. They named a first user, showed something that already worked, and split the work into milestones with dates we could check. The weak ones described a market and asked for money to find out what to build in it.
Tell us who will use it in the first month. If you can name the shop or the person, you are most of the way there.
You don't need a deck, and we never take equity or tokens. Code funded by the grant ships under an open licence, and products you build on top of it can stay closed.
Dates
Calls with two reviewers run from 15 Dec to 23 Jan, and every applicant gets an answer by 30 Jan 2027. First tranches are paid in February, in USDC or ORL. Jonas Weber, Mei Tanaka, Carlos Ruiz and I will read every application, and we will reply to each one, yes or no.
