Miden Pioneer program

Miden is preparing to launch its mainnet in late 2025, with the vision of fostering the widespread adoption of impactful, user-focused products. To achieve this, Miden is supporting the creation of innovative products that provide the following:

  • Clear Product-Market Fit: Solves a real-world problem, and addresses significant user demand
  • Strong Technical Focus: High-quality technical architecture and codebase, paired with an intuitive user experience
  • Security & Compliance: Designed for security and reliability in highly regulated environments

What is a Miden Pioneer?

Pioneers are Miden’s first ecosystem-supported projects. They are building the future of on-chain economies, harnessing a first-mover advantage with support from a vast network of resources.

The Pioneer Program provides projects support in three key areas:

Technical Support

  • 1-on-1 Support
  • Issue prioritization
  • Direct Debugging Assistance

Financial Support

  • Grants
  • Retroactive Public Good Funding

Business Support

  • VC Introductions
  • Marketing Advice
  • General Legal Advice
  • Business Development Strategy

Who We’re Looking For

  • You have expertise in building and shipping crypto products with some level of product-market fit
  • You have an audience, a reasonable product distribution channel, or a strategy for distribution
  • You are highly driven to innovate through leveraging Miden’s core features to build the future of on-chain economies
  • You are willing to take calculated risks, explore new ideas, and thrive in a rapidly developing ecosystem environment

Miden aims to support the development of innovative projects that solve real-world problems. Through the Pioneer Program, we focus on identifying teams capable of building Lighthouse applications.

What is a Lighthouse Application?

Lighthouse applications showcase Miden’s core features and unique value proposition. By demonstrating what’s possible on Miden, these applications act as a “Lighthouse” for users, developers and the broader ecosystem.

We aim to launch on mainnet with five Lighthouse applications, each pushing the boundaries of what can be built in a scalable, private-by-default and secure on-chain environment.

The goals of a Lighthouse application are to:

  1. Drive meaningful user activity to Miden
  2. Provide valuable feedback to the core Miden team
  3. Highlight ecosystem needs, such as wallets, oracles, and identity solutions

What We’re Looking For

We are looking for applications with a clear user demand and the potential to scale. Some ideas we are excited about include:

DeFi

  • Compliant dark pool
  • Private order book / anonymous OTC trading
  • Private asset management
  • Private lending and borrowing protocol

Payment

  • Private peer-to-peer payment (1-to-1)
  • Private payroll automation (1-to-n)
  • Point-of-sale tools and physical payment cards (e.g. a Miden-powered private credit card)

Real World Assets

  • Private ownership and proof-of-ownership for real world assets

Identity

  • Provable KYC
  • Decentralized identity and compliance tooling

These are only starting points. If you’re building something uniquely suited to Miden’s features, we want to hear from you.

Program Incentives

To support and incentivize builders, the Pioneer Program is structured in two phases. Each phase offers funding, guidance, and hands-on support to help you succeed.

Phase 1 – Early Contributors

Explore → Build → Propose
Funding: $20,000 grant
This phase is about validating your idea and building early traction.

What to expect

  1. Choose your direction: Use our Lighthouse examples for inspiration or pitch something new.
  2. Register your team: Contact us to sign up as an aspiring Pioneer.
  3. Build a PoC: Create a proof-of-concept over three weeks.
  4. Submit a proposal: Outline your project vision and technical approach.
  5. Evaluation: The Miden team will review your submission.
  6. Legal Agreement & Subsequent Funding: Upon approval, sign legal docs for funding and receive a $20,000 grant (independent of whether you continue to Phase 2).

Phase 2 – Miden Pioneers

Build → Launch → Scale
Funding: Up to $300,000 in milestone-based grants
Teams that show strong promise in Phase 1 will be invited to join the full Pioneer Program.

What you’ll receive:

  • Milestone-based funding: Grants of up to $300,000 based on clear development goals
  • Risk mitigation: Significant cost coverage to support long-term product development
  • Ongoing support: Deep technical guidance, business mentorship, and integration into the Miden ecosystem

Ready to build the future of on-chain economies?
Apply to the Pioneer program today →