Ethereum Foundation Awards Millions In New Grant Funding

The non-profit dedicated to advancing and maintaining ethereum's software has officially announced the recipients of its first wave of development grants.

A total of 13 projects received more than $2.5 million combined to work on scalability, security, development experiences, user interface study and other derivatives of the ethereum blockchain, according to a Wednesday announcement.

The grants will help the ethereum community better develop distributed applications (dapps) and smart contracts, according to the post. The Foundation also noted the different topics each of the recipients is researching, and said, "we hope that these grants will signal to the community what we think are the missing pieces in the ecosystem that need more support."

The Foundation continued, saying it "is here to serve teams and individuals that are working to prevent a tragedy of the commons."

Notably, it went on to acknowledge that the grant program had changed its focus since its first announcement in January. At the time, it was aimed at developers working on scaling ethereum’s network, as previously reported.

On Wednesday, the Foundation explained the change:

“We decided to broaden the support to projects that are doing great work across scalability, usefulness and security. These projects have no ICOs, no token sales, and focus simply on building useful products and experiences.”

Nor are the grants strictly related to the main network. The Foundation noted that some of its grants went to “hackternships” for members of the community who proposed a useful side project.

That being said, some of the largest grants went towards scalability research - L4 Research, which earned $1.5 million to work on state channels, while Prysmatic Labs earned $100,000 for work on sharding.

Ether image via Shutterstock