Initially announced at Devcon 4 in 2018, Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of ConsenSys, one of the world’s largest blockchain companies, building the tools, infrastructure, and apps that power the Ethereum network ― created a $550,000 grant fund to be distributed to projects building out the Ethereum ecosystem.
ConsenSys Grants funds open-source projects that benefit the greater Ethereum ecosystem. Projects supported include critical areas such as core infrastructure, improved developer tooling and UX, security, and access to knowledge for developers, users, and social impact projects.
Since 2019, the ConsenSys Grants program has funded 25 projects in total.
Now, the ConsenSys Grants program has announced the third cohort of projects to receive funding:
Infrastructure:
- Ethereum State Analytics: $25,000 to an accessible and reproducible analytics tool tracking Ethereum growth, based on Turbo Geth.
Ecosystem Growth:
- BlockchainsForSchools: $10,000 to a team of high school and college students bringing the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and engineers into the blockchain industry.
- BURNER WALLET 2: The next step of the Burner Wallet project is to extend further than a simple onboarding/event tool. The low friction user experience of the Wallet can enable it to function as “remote control” for using dapps, awarded $10,000.
Usability + Dev Tooling:
- EthereumETL: $10,000 for facilitating big data science processes with Ethereum data.
Previous projects to receive funding from ConsenSys Grants include:
Security
- Lighthouse: Ethereum Serenity client enabling users to enjoy the benefits of a sharded, proof-of-stake Ethereum platform with 1000x capacity, $50,000.
- Unikeys: Biometric card hardware wallets that enable crypto users to easily and securely validate payments using their cards with smartphones, $25,000.
Infrastructure
- Gas Station Network: / EIP-1613: Solving the gasless user’s onboarding problem in a trustless decentralized way, through a network of incentivized relays, $25,000.
- Notus: service that allows users to trigger webhooks from Ethereum smart contract events or Graph Protocol GraphQL subscriptions, $5,000.
- Zeropool: A fully anonymous and non-trackable transactions on Ethereum supporting multiple ERC20 tokens, ethers, and anonymous atomic swaps, $25,000.
- PISA: Building and protecting global, privacy-preserving, permissionless and off-chain smart contracts, $25,000.
- Tellor: A decentralized oracle that provides an efficient, trustless and decentralized alternative for off-chain data, $25,000.
- DappNode: A decentralized network of personally-owned nodes with and user-friendly interface, $25,000.
- Trueblocks: Framework that indexes appearances of addresses, providing lightning-fast access to full, complete, audit-quality transaction histories for any address, $25,000.
Usability + dev tooling
- Kickback: Helps blockchain event organizers attract new participants with little to no knowledge or experience of interacting with dapps and smart contracts, $10,000.
- Vyper: A contract-oriented, pythonic programming language targeting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) – $30,000.
- Alice: Mobile app to easily build native mobile applications, $25,000.
- Ethers.js: A complete Ethereum JavaScript library for building wallets, frameworks, and tools, with a focus on security, compactness and simplicity, $25,000.
- ETH Dev Tools: ‘Swiss-army knife’ chrome extension tool that gives developers strong inspection, debugging, and manual testing abilities during dapp development, $10,000.
- Mailchain: Easily send and receive rich-media HTML messages between blockchain public addresses through a simple, email-like interface, $25,000.
- Reach: Programming language/development platform that abstracts away the complications of the blockchain while automatically formally-verifying an entire dapp, $25,000.
- Tribute: DeFi subscription micropayments layer built on rDAI and powered by directing interest flows from crypto holdings to whatever the owner wishes to support, $10,000.
Social Impact
- Ribbon Blockchain: Public Health Incentives App: Using tokenized incentives to make positive lifestyle changes & reducing the burden on the medical system, $25,000.
- Nori: Using blockchain technology to incentivize carbon removal makes sense. Nori is preventing fraud and double-counting in the carbon market, and the NORI token enables the world to set a truly market-driven price on removing a ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, $10,000.
Education + technical knowledge
- Black Girls CODE Blockchain Immersion Program: A three-tiered blockchain program that focuses on education, immersion, and the provision of “hackternships” to test practical ecosystem knowledge, $25,000.
- Africa Blockchain Developers Program: Giving African developers the opportunity to gain the skills necessary to become industry-ready blockchain developers, $10,000.
“Sigma Prime is extremely grateful for the support received from ConsenSys. This grant helped us scale the Lighthouse development team, allowing us to hire and retain amazing talents. We’re proud of all the progress achieved over the past few months, with Lighthouse becoming a leading Eth2 implementation. The funding received from ConsenSys is instrumental to reaching our goals.”
– Mehdi Zerouali, Director, Sigma Prime
“ConsenSys Grants is more than the money; it helped the team understand it’s on the right track, and gave community validation. A great tool for showing community that this is a step in the right direction.”
– Yoav Weiss, CTO, TabooKey (Gas Station Network)
“Girls are coming out of the program so well-rounded, educated, and being able to compete in the blockchain space. They are telling their story through the communities that they serve. It has been awesome. And provided them a platform to be invited to the blockchain ecosystem.”
– Ewurabena Ashun, Curriculum Management & Development , Black Girls Code