Our goal on the grants team is to be faithful stewards of the Ethereum community resources. As part of the Ethereum Foundation’s ongoing effort to spread power in our community, we award grants that we believe will have the greatest impact on the Ethereum ecosystem in the long term.
What is the scope of EF grants?
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Open source!
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Funding is for future work only.
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Avoid playing favorites. We try not to give one team an advantage over the others.
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Avoid compromises at the application layer, although we believe that projects and teams working in the application layer should apply when they are creating open source tools applicable to the broader ecosystem.
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Avoid giving a “seal of approval” from the Ethereum Foundation. EF grants are not intended to be an endorsement of any particular project over others.
How do we evaluate applications?
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We think about the greatest impact by asking ourselves:
- How important would this be to the ecosystem?
- How urgent is the problem?
- How many other people are working on this problem?
- How much value do we get from giving a grant compared to doing nothing?
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We are favorably biased towards projects with reasonable paths to sustainability. This helps ensure a long-term impact on the investment of community resources.
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We are looking for applicants with relevant experience or proven ability to execute, commensurate with the grant amount
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Alignment with Ethereum values
Note: Because we offer non-dilutive capital, we expect to pay a discount to your market rate.
We realize that our decision-making process will never be perfect, but we always do our best to continually improve the speed and quality of the decision-making process.