How the Ethereum Foundation Grant Program Makes Decisions
The grant team’s goal is to be a faithful steward of the Ethereum community’s resources. As part of the Ethereum Foundation’s ongoing effort to decentralize power across the community, we are providing grants that we believe will have the greatest impact on the Ethereum ecosystem over the long term.
What is the scope of the EF grant?
Open source!
The funds will only be used for future work.
Avoid playing favorites. We strive to ensure that no one team has an advantage over the other.
Don’t subsidize the application layer. However, we believe that projects and teams working at the application layer should apply it when building open source tools that can be applied to the broader ecosystem.
Please do not give the Ethereum Foundation your “stamp of approval”. EF grants are not intended to endorse one project over another.
How do you evaluate applications?
We believe we can have the greatest impact by asking ourselves the following questions:
- How important is this to the ecosystem?
- How urgent is the problem?
- How many people are solving this problem?
- How much value do you get from giving a subsidy compared to doing nothing?
We are biased in favor of projects with a reasonable path to sustainability. This helps ensure long-term impact on community resource investments.
We look for applicants with relevant experience or proven execution skills in line with the amount of support.
Consistent with Ethereum values
Note: Because we are providing non-dilutive capital, we expect to pay a discount from market rates.
We know that our decision-making process can never be perfect, but we always do our best to continually improve the speed and quality of our decision-making process.
