How the Ethereum Foundation grants program makes decisions

Our goal on the grants team is to be faithful stewards of Ethereum community resources. As part of the Ethereum Foundation’s ongoing effort to diffuse power throughout our community, we give grants that we believe will return the highest impact on the Ethereum ecosystem over the long-term.

What is the scope of EF grants?

• Open source!

• Funding is only for future work

• Avoid playing favorites.  We try not to advantage one team over others

• Avoid grants at the application layer, though we do believe that projects and teams working at the application layer should apply when they are building open source tools applicable to the wider ecosystem

• Avoid giving an Ethereum Foundation “stamp of approval.”  EF Grants are not intended to be an endorsement of a particular project over others.

How do we evaluate applications?

• We think about highest 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 by giving a grant compared to doing nothing?

• We are favorably biased towards projects with reasonable paths towards sustainability.  This helps ensure a long-term impact on the investment of community resources.

• We look for applicants with relevant experience or proven ability to execute, commensurate with the grant amount

• Alignment with Ethereum values

Note: because we are offering non-dilutive capital, we expect to pay a discount on 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.