DAPPCON 2018: Intro to ECF: Grants for Web 3.0 Ecosystem Builders - Ethereum Community Fund

Transcript

yeah so this is the last talk of the days thank you for bearing with me and I know everybody just wants to leave and get drinks so this will be a short one and I'm here to talk about the a theorem Community Fund which is initiative which is a grant funds to support instructure research education and community building initiatives that benefit the UTM ecosystem by providing both funding and connectivity so the theme community found it started by some of the most recognizable names in the ecosystem or Ethier mitrice an ecosystem like cosmos a Mesa go golem what three make her status and supported by the ETM foundation work the we work

with them very closely so the e theorem foundation also has a grant program which is similar to what we do but we take a slightly different approach so metallic pewter in himself is also advisor of the fund so we're also growing it with network other than those following members new members are also joining as donors the recent ones are like expecting and constant so the questions like why why do I have to like why do we start ECF so it's really not a old story that like ëthere mean structure it's not really there to support millions of users there's a lot of problems in scaling usability security developer tools that

are really needed for us to reach the point after just method option so although there's a lot of like funding went in the ICO craze but number of funding went into instructure buildings actually relatively small so and also because in structures is a common good that belongs to everyone there's no central party to control it so it end up becoming like the entity belonging to no one so no one really takes time and effort to maintain it so from 2000 2017 there's about 12 billion dollars that went into all sorts of ICO investment but the number of grants or a member of just nonprofit funding went into

instructure building from Paris Park Asians various programs actually only eight million so grant funding is only a very very very tiny pieces like it just highly dropping the ocean comparing to all the crazy amount of money went into the blockchain space in general and so the question is like why if I'm building a structure why shouldn't I just take some invested money or tokenize my in structure protocol and the reason is sometimes most of the times Community Interest and the investor interests inherently inheriting doesn't really match so we want to get people to optionality to build what matters and we want to get them optionality to find a funding tool that is most of the language the products go so the investor

interest and community interest sometimes in this match the reasons our investors care about value accrual investors care about like building competitive advantage around their protocol or products that means sometimes they prefer to take it to keep the technology close source if it can to keep it our proprietary also they care about tokenization because that's a vehicle they make money through the investment they also care about monetization of the product and communities care about different set of things they care about building what's needed not what's profitable even something isn't inherent and practical they also care about past Stander's best practices and the high quality of code

so knowledge sharing is really good for community but isn't necessarily good for investment and utilities and provided for a broader use cases in the correct way also matters for the community and for sharing structure but not necessarily for investors and also most importantly importantly as a community they care about how to open source products should care about how to attract more people to contribute so because the inherent cause of interest we want to give people no string attached to money so they can focus on building what's important instead of worrying about token sells were outside investors who are monetization so what we don't want projects to do is to force

a token I mean self prematurely necessarily just for the sake of raising money so the ECI comes to us one of like kind of the solutions to it they're kind of like one of the solutions to solve the incentive problem in the blockchain space for building structures but there we still we still face was a lot of challenges so like for our Grants Program it isn't really a long-term sustainable so we have to figure out what is the best way going forward to create more long-term sustainable model so that we're not only based on donations but there are also other innovative like models we can kind of experiment with and also how do I have more people participate in the grant

making decision and I mean on the other hand like how do I find the right balance between over in central incentivization and on during centralization because allow people who are working on open source projects doesn't necessarily care about the incentives or the reward they care about the they care about the community they care about the reputation there are other various motivators that are not necessarily financial reward so we're how do we strike the balance between incentivization as well as like other reasons people contribute to open source project so those are all great questions and challenges for us to figure out so what type of project do we fund and

number one is definitely in structured scalability privacy security either on protocol that layer on layer 2 so people often ask the question when can you theorem scale and I think that kind of question isn't the best to ask because it assumes that there are some centralized party or someone else who's taking ownership of a theorem scalability and so I think there are so many ways a group of people can come to be the scaling both annelid layer 2 or Warren layer both on the base protocol layer were on there too of course ether foundation metallic and all other researchers who are doing the cutting as researchers for scowling by the same

time there's also various organizations and teams working alongside with the ETM foundation that are contributing a very significant way for scaling so for example one of the group that is working on a sharding client is part isn't part of the foundation they are independent group that received grants so prismatic labs is the group working on the sharding clients received money from both ECF and EF so that's all around the protocol err you don't have to be part of the ETM foundation or any centralized group to be able to contribute and I layer - there are even more like players and more different parties kind of doing very scaling techniques and I think even like if you just there are also other ways to come to be to sculling such as

like even improve the documentation or creating a new model to incentivize different people to work together to collaborate on scaling and keeping sync up the information or even ways to bring new people into working on different scaling techniques those are all ways you can contribute to scouting so it really isn't really about one centralized party it's like it's a permissionless system I think anybody can contribute so we're promoting also we're also looking for kind of standard on the layer 2 level but in a non rent-seeking way so that's an instructor side so developer tooling side we're looking for various tools that improves developer experience like debuggers that

come up over and over again and people want better debuggers that people want better testing frameworks people want about the documentation and those are all things that like we're looking for that can improve developer experience on the research side new approaches to key challenges of the ECM technology like privacy is calibrated and security crypto economics it's also about like it's not about promoting researchers within the communities as well it's equally important to bring people to other disciplines like economics like computer science from all set the blockchain community to contribute to

those research active research areas we also are very interesting understanding the current state of adoption education and developer experience so for example if price is a very great initiative where it interviewed more than a hundred developers this developers through those interviews like you kind of understand what are the key challenges that everybody faces and what are some interesting areas that are missing and what are the tools that people all need so we're also encouraging this kind of like research slash community thing where you go talk to people and find out defining the common challenge defining the common challenges so there are subgroups forming like there are the UX workgroups there's also

like the security work groups were looking to support those communities who are forming to not only just as like just like meeting but also like working collectively as a community but also like communicating what's important within that subgroup to the broader community and defining like challenges and things that can be built improve that sub-domain within within theorem so on the user instructor side we're looking for like user friendly secure wallets both hardware and software and and web 3 clients and on the education side we'll really want to keep the existing community engaged as well as as

track as well as attracting new developers or new community members so we're doing developer focused community girls like those conferences the target and bringing more fresh blood into the ecosystem so the requirement of grants it has to be open source it has to be a shared public good it can not only benefit one single entity it needs to be something the community want as a whole and the project shouldn't have plans for media fundraising through tokens or equity and the reason for that is that it's not that we want to confine project to not take on other ways of funding it's more like opportunity cost for us and at the same time we want like we so

if the proud in the current we want the proud to be in the current stage to focus on building but not fundraising but in the future if it's at a later stage where it makes sense for the project to raise other from funding we actually support it we're also open to found project that built by individuals or teams that are from a for-profit who are from the post ISIL entity so for example if the 0ax team just example we're not affiliate was the relaxed so if the Xerox team wants to come in and build a open-source meta mask which satisfies all other requirements for were looking for we're happy to support proudest of that type so as long as it's open source as long as utility for the community so like we're not only like supporting

individuals but we're also open to fund kind of public good projects by for-profit companies so the application process works like this you go on the website submit and now submit is they up the network to submit application and there will be a team review and interview kind of process and we also rely on all like various like technical experts within the ECF network to help us to do diligence after the interview the decision will be made relatively like within one to two months is what we aim to achieve or sometimes it's a little lower than that because we're still in the stage to figure out was the best kind of streamline process and the

average grant size is between 50,000 to 200,000 USD that's in the ring job I was a typical sit round for a start funding so after we post grants also provide source of all sorts of support for the quantities including mentorship networking opportunities and also opportunity to showcase your project to East at events and on our podcast so also it's really a community of like-minded builders that you can you can join so some recent grantees include a prismatic labs excellent East Price swing by which is a stable point protocol reality check which the Oracle

protocol as well as a coin so get coin is a really great platform for open source software bounties and we've been using geek one to support some of the smaller sized bounties that is too much overhead for easy up to to manage correctly so