Glow launched in October 2025 as an experiment in retroactive funding for the XRPL ecosystem. After roughly six months, we've done an honest review. Some things worked. Some things didn't. This post explains what we learned and what we're changing.
What we found
The program funded real work: node management tooling, transactional dashboards, post-quantum integrations. And community voting gave the process legitimacy. But the pipeline of new projects was thinner than we hoped. Waves that were designed to run monthly stretched to two or three months as we waited for enough submissions to make a round worthwhile. Some strong projects were funded across multiple waves, which the program is designed to support, but it also meant the pool wasn't growing the way we wanted.
Scout referrals, the program's main intake mechanism, didn't generate the volume or variety we'd hoped for. Relying on referrals as the only door put a lot of weight on a small group and requires all three parties — applicants, scouts, and judges — to be active at the same time to function. That kind of dependency is more fragile than we'd like.
We're addressing that directly.
What's changing
Open applications. Anyone can now submit their project directly, without needing a scout referral. Scouts remain part of the program, but they're no longer the only door in. This is the most significant structural change we're making, and it's a direct response to the pipeline problem.
Quarterly cadence. We're formalizing what was already happening in practice. Waves will run on a three-month cycle, which reduces coordination overhead and gives the ecosystem more time to produce work worth funding.
Project types. Eligibility explicitly covers technical debt, protocol improvements, standards work, documentation, community tools, and supporting infrastructure. If you've been maintaining something the ecosystem quietly depends on, this program is for you.
Affiliation and employment. We're removing restrictions that blocked some contributors from applying based on where they work. The principle remains the same — Glow is for independent work, not for compensating people for their day jobs. Disclosure is required, and voters will weigh that context when deciding.
Business model flexibility. Glow used to favor non-profit and fully open-source projects. We're broadening that to include freemium products where a substantive, genuinely useful tier is available to the community at no cost. What remains ineligible: paywalled products, token-centric projects with no immediate utility, and anything that delivers minimal real value.
Why we're sharing this
Iteration is at the core of every program Commons has built since 2023. That only means something if we're honest about what the previous iteration actually looked like. Glow's first phase was quieter than planned. The changes above are our response to that: lower barriers to entry, less coordination overhead, more room for the ecosystem to surprise us.
Show your work. Applying to Glow is also an opportunity to put your project in front of the XRPL ecosystem. We encourage applicants to share what they're building publicly on X, in community forums, wherever your audience lives. Not to campaign for votes, but because visibility is part of how open-source ecosystems grow. The best projects tend to generate their own conversation.
Let’s glow!
