Yesterday, the Ethereum Foundation, produced a letter which reveals more information about the Foundation’s priorities for the next year, and how it expects to allocate resources across the ecosystem.
Over the next year, the Ethereum Foundation plans to spend $30 million USD on key projects across the ecosystem, the budget being insulated against downward ETH price movement.
“As we’ve learned and iterated, we’ve made necessary changes to our processes and priorities. When the Ethereum ecosystem was much smaller, it made sense for the Foundation to prioritize several “in-house” teams to work on the most fundamental projects. As the community grew, we began a Grants program that enabled us to support more teams throughout the ecosystem. Today, it shouldn’t matter to the Foundation whether a project is “internal” or “external”. What matters is that we’re spending resources effectively, and that Ethereum’s goals are accomplished. This is why we are moving toward an “ecosystem level view” when allocating resources by looking at the whole picture rather than at a subset of it.”
Below, is the portion of the letter where the Foundation describes three primary categories of resource allocation: (i) Building the Ethereum of tomorrow, (ii) Supporting the Ethereum of today, and (iii) Developer Growth & Awareness.
i. Building the Ethereum of tomorrow
$19 million earmarked over the next 12 months
“Ethereum remains a highly ambitious technical project, and significant resources are required to fund the R&D that will realize the Ethereum community’s ambitions. Critical work is underway across the ecosystem on active engineering projects like ETH 2.0, and on more long-term investments like growing the academic community’s involvement in Ethereum technology.”
This includes:
- ETH 2.0: Client teams, Research, VDF, documentation, and communication
- Layer 2: State channels & Plasma
- Continuing work on eWASM
- Smart contract languages
- Formal verification, auditing, and specification work
- Zero-knowledge R&D, including ZoKrates
- Ethereum “Phase 3 and Beyond” R&D
- Working directly with academic institutions and attracting exceptional research talent
ii. Supporting the Ethereum of today
$8 million earmarked over the next 12 months.
“Ethereum is used in production today to secure billions of dollars of assets and as a base layer for many hundreds of live applications. The Foundation “believes that it is vital to continue supporting these efforts to ensure that ‘Ethereum 1.0’ continues to be the world’s dominant smart-contract platform.”
This includes:
- Many initiatives under the banner of “ETH 1.x”
- Geth
- Solidity
- Web3.js and Ethers.js
iii. Developer Growth & Awareness
$3 million earmarked over the next 12 months
“Ethereum is a platform and the developers who build on it are a key part of our future. It is critical to invest in developer relations, education, and on-boarding today in order to grow the Ethereum community and to ensure our continued success. This is especially important in Asia, where significant opportunity exists for Ethereum to grow. This figure also includes more traditional efforts to grow awareness of Ethereum, through marketing efforts at both technical audiences and at users of Ethereum-based applications.”
This includes:
- Developer education & on-boarding
- Supporting community event organizations focused on developers, like ETHGlobal
- Continuing to run Devcon as a yearly gathering for the Ethereum ecosystem
- Supporting regional Ethereum community organizations
- Developer experience improvements and developer tooling
- Attracting exceptional developer talent
- Encouraging browsers and other mass consumer technologies to seamlessly integrate Ethereum into their user experiences
- Continued improvements to ethereum.org
