The five checks
1. ≥ 100 transactions on the testnet, verifiable in the explorer.
The project's account(s) appear on EmpooScan with finalized extrinsics. If the indexer is behind, chain_getBlock on a public node with the hashes the team recorded is accepted. The transactions must be the project's own flow, not a loop of transfers.
2. Open source. A public repository, or one the committee can access. No fully closed projects; no direct forks without substantial change.
3. A demo that runs.
Video or live, at least five minutes, showing the main flow end to end against the public testnet — not a local --dev chain.
4. A reproducible README. A committee member clones, follows the steps, and reaches the same state. If a step says ask the team for test DMS, that is honest and acceptable; if a step assumes a faucet that does not exist, it fails.
5. At least one native pallet.
A call to a pallet — dex, identitySsi, escrow, aiServing, anything native — appears in the project's transactions. An EVM-only project can be excellent and still not meet this one.
Why these and not others
Each check can be repeated by someone who was not there: read the chain, clone the repo, watch the demo, follow the README, decode the calls. The ecosystem adopted this standard for itself after finding claims in its own documents that nobody could repeat — three validators that did not exist, a 100 % coverage figure measured against its own list. A project is complete when a stranger can confirm it.
What happens on failure
No penalty — there is no money. The project is not listed as completed and gets no public mention. The listing is the reward, so the check is the gate.
Radar
The page this replaces announced winners of another ecosystem's hackathon. EmpoorioChain's has not happened. Its first completed projects will appear in the grants document's table — ten rows, currently and honestly empty — with their transaction counts.
Based on TESTNET_GRANTS_PROGRAM.md §5 and TESTNET_HACKATHON_PLAN.md §4.