Maybe a different way to look at this would be to come up with some sort of incentive for authors to create different types of basic examples that could demonstrate various use cases for xel. That might draw in some outside groups to take a look at xel to see what it is capable.
That would seem possible as a contest, if giving out prizes to such as the top 1 or top 5 submissions. Each submission would show working code in the Elastic programming language, while finding and demonstrating an use case where Elastic exceptionally exceeds other alternatives on something particularly useful.
(Presumably the niches of Elastic are where it has much increased performance on some problems, compared to a single personal computer, while being a lot cheaper and more conveniently accessible for many users than a conventional centralized supercomputer).
Judging the most useful and best submissions would be tricky, but a small panel of several people volunteering as judges might make a reasonably fair attempt, if each judge had some reputation and expertise (again, probably drawing from universities).
Since that metric of success is somewhat subjective, perfect judgment may be impossible, but it does not have to be perfect, as long as competitors feel the judging is decent enough to take part.
After all, there have been contests elsewhere which are even more subjective (such as awards for top artist submissions, or top engineering concept designs).
How about a contest where the winner gets 'x' amount of free processing power on the network? So we could ask for projects that are 'worthy' of being given free processing power on the network, up to a value of $5,000 - $50,000 in XEL (depending what the community agrees) and approach universities and scientific journals to make them aware of the contest.
That way we don't have to create use cases, the applicants create the use cases by applying. We'll need someone that's technically competent to say where an entry is technically valid and therefore a 'use case' and the best potential 'use case'. which shows off the potential of Elastic and is deemed worthy of getting the free processing power by the judges, wins.
Since the contest will take some time to run, hopefully Elastic will be listed on exchanges and we will be able to ascertain how much XEL needs to be contributed by the community to fund the reward.