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ConsenSys Grants

Blockchain Funding & Ethereum Grants

We're a gateway for funding your next Ethereum project.

About

We’re a gateway for funding open source Ethereum projects.

ConsenSys Grants funds blockchain technology projects that meet the needs of a rapidly-accelerating Ethereum ecosystem. Some key areas include: core infrastructure, social impact, improved developer tooling and UX, security, and access to education. We are equally focused on funding core components and technology that will enable far-reaching community building projects in the blockchain space. ​Throughout 2019 we will give away $550,000 worth of grants dispersed in amounts of $10,000 and $25,000 via GitCoin, a community-driven tool that allows grantees to receive a stream of payments by successfully meeting milestones. We strive to understand core needs of the ecosystem, and look for great projects who respond to those fundamental needs by enabling others to build on their developments.

ConsenSys Grants will support projects by connecting both the community of grantees and the Grants Advisory Committee, as well as providing access to the ConsenSys mesh of products and initiatives. In addition, ConsenSys will help highlight grantee projects through ConsenSys Media.

 

Meet Our Recent Grantees

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is a security-focused Ethereum Serenity client. As a free, open-source Ethereum Serenity client, Lighthouse will enable users to enjoy the benefits of a sharded, proof-of-stake Ethereum platform, providing at least 1000x capacity. This project lays the foundation for future improvements that can provide exponential scalability to Ethereum. Further, proof-of-stake eliminates resource-intensive mining operations, minimizing energy consumption.

Lighthouse

Black Girls CODE Blockchain Immersion Program

BGC seeks to provide young women of color with the skills to both develop into thought leaders within the developer space and occupy developer, designer, and business roles in the expanding blockchain ecosystem. To do so, Black Girls CODE is developing a three-tiered blockchain program that focuses on education, immersion, and the provision of “hackternships” to test practical ecosystem knowledge.

Black Girls CODE Blockchain Immersion Program

Notus

Notifications and transactional email are essential for a quality user experience. Notus aims to make providing the same level of service to dapp users as easy as possible. Notus is a service that allows users to trigger webhooks from Ethereum smart contract events or Graph Protocol GraphQL subscriptions.

Notus

Grant Categories

Infrastructure L1 and L2

Infrastructure L1 and L2

Including research, scalability, privacy, interoperability.

Education  amp  Technical Knowledge

Education & Technical Knowledge

Building tutorials for developing with the web3 stack.

Usability  amp  Dev Tooling

Usability & Dev Tooling

Including wallets, linters, next gen user onboarding.

Social Impact

Social Impact

Enabling the betterment of society and/or democratize public access to resources.

Security

Security

Including platforms, tools, languages, (formal) verification, usability.

Important Dates

Wave I:

Closed – Check out the list of current Grantees below

Wave II:

Closed – Grantees to be announced at Devcon 5, 2019

Wave III:

Now Closed – 
The deadline to submit applications is January 14, 2020.

Application Process

Step 1:

Step 2:

We will reach out for Interviews if your application is deemed a good fit

Step 3:

Acceptance & Denial Notifications

Step 4:

Grantee Onboarding & Milestone Setting and Mentor Matching

Step 5:

Grant Period Completion & Exit Interviews

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Wave I Grantees

Thank you to everyone who applied for a ConsenSys Grant! We received an outstanding number of applications and were blown away by the number of diverse and creative submissions received. ConsenSys Grants is constantly refining itself to better serve the community and we thank everyone who has provided helpful feedback. Our efforts are further amplified through the work you have contributed on a day to day basis and we look forward to reviewing future applications! 

Check out the first wave of recipients of ConsenSys Grants, and keep an eye out for opportunities for your own project to receive funding!

Social Impact

Ribbon BlockchainPublic Health Incentives App – $25,000
Ribbon is a public health incentives app using tokenized incentives to make positive lifestyle changes. It is focused on reducing the burden on the medical system and making communities healthier. 

Nori$10,000
Nori is finding a way to solve climate change—not just make it less bad. 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.

Usability and Dev Tooling

KickBack – $10,000
KickBack will help blockchain event organizers attract new participants with little to no knowledge or experience of interacting with dapps and smart contracts. Kickback (and “Blockparty”, its predecessor prototype) have so far served over 50 events with nearly 1000 participants. These were mostly crypto related meetups, hackathons, conference, and social events.

Vyper: – $10,000  
A contract-oriented, pythonic programming language targeting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Infrastructure

Gas stations network / EIP-1613 – $25,000
Solving the gasless users onboarding problem in a trustless decentralized way through a network of incentivized relays. 

Notus – $10,000
Notifications and transactional email are essential for a quality user experience. Notus aims to make providing the same level of service to dapp users as easy as possible. Notus is a service that allows users to trigger webhooks from Ethereum smart contract events or Graph Protocol GraphQL subscriptions. 

Education & Technical Knowledge

Black Girls CODE Blockchain Immersion Program – $25,000
BGC seeks to provide young women of color with the skills to both develop into thought leaders within the developer space and occupy developer, designer, and business roles in the expanding blockchain ecosystem. To do so, Black Girls CODE is developing a three-tiered blockchain program that focuses on education, immersion, and the provision of “hackternships” to test practical ecosystem knowledge. 

Africa Blockchain Developers Program –  $10,000
The goal of the Ethereum developer program is to give African developers the opportunity to gain the skills necessary to become industry-ready blockchain developers. ABA is working with our network of partners across the continent to provide mentorship and support activities to developers. Projects for participants sponsored through this grant will be social impact challenges to solve unique African problems co-ideated with ConsenSys. 

Security

Lighthouse, a security-focused Ethereum Serenity client – $25,000
Lighthouse is a security-focused Ethereum Serenity client. As a free, open-source Ethereum Serenity client, Lighthouse will enable users to enjoy the benefits of a sharded, proof-of-stake Ethereum platform, providing at least 1000x capacity. This project lays the foundation for future improvements that can provide exponential scalability to Ethereum. Further, proof-of-stake eliminates resource-intensive mining operations, minimizing energy consumption.

Wave II Grantees

Usability and Dev Tooling

Alice$25,000
Mobile app to easily build native mobile Ethereum applications.

Ethers.js$25,000
A complete Ethereum JavaScript library for building wallets, frameworks and tools, with a focus on security, compactness and simplicity.

ETH Dev Tools – $10,000
‘Swiss-army knife’ chrome extension tool that gives developers strong inspection, debugging, and manual testing abilities during dapp development.

Mailchain – $25,000
Easily send and receive rich-media HTML messages between blockchain public addresses through a simple, email-like interface.

Reach – $25,000
Programming language/development platform that abstracts away the complications of the blockchain while automatically formally-verifying an entire dapp.

Tribute – $10,000
DeFi subscription micropayments layer built on rDAI and powered by directing interest flows from crypto holdings to whatever the owner wishes to support.

Vyper: – $20,000
Programming language awarded a follow-on

Security

Lighthouse – $25,000
A security-focused Ethereum Serenity client awarded a follow-on grant.

Unikeys – $25,000
Biometric card hardware wallets that enable crypto users to easily and securely validate payments using their cards with smartphones.

Infrastructure

Dappnode – $25,000
A decentralized network of personally-owned nodes with a user-friendly interface.

PISA$25,000
Building and protecting global, privacy-preserving, permissionless, off-chain smart contracts.

Tellor $25,000
A decentralized oracle that provides an efficient, trustless, and decentralized alternative for off-chain data.

Trueblocks – $25,000
Framework that indexes appearances of addresses, providing lightning-fast access to full, complete, audit-quality transaction histories for any address.

Zeropool – $25,000
A platform for fully anonymous and non-trackable transactions on Ethereum, supporting multiple ERC20 tokens, ether, and anonymous atomic swaps.

Wave III Grantees

Usability and Dev Tooling

EthereumETL – $10,000
Facilitating big data science processes with Ethereum data

Connexion – $10,000
A communications platform to connect the Ethereum ecosystem through decentralized messaging.

TypeChain – $5,000
TypeScript typings generator for Ethererum smart contracts with support for multiple targets.

Infrastructure

Ethereum State Analytics – $25,000
An accessible and reproducible analytics tool tracking Ethereum growth, based on Turbo Geth.

Ecosystem Growth

BlockchainsForSchools – $10,000
A team of high school and college students bringing the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and engineers into the blockchain industry.

Burner Wallet 2 – $10,000
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 a “remote control” for using dapps.

Trust Graphic Novel – $10,000
A graphic novel that tells the story of a young Kenyan woman who transforms her community using ethereum.

Arboreum – $10,000
By combining the digital ledger technology, with machine-learning, and swarm-intelligence principles, Arboreum can effectively turn a blockchain network into “swarms” capable of solving complex coordination problems by themselves!

ConsenSys Grants funds projects that meet the needs of a rapidly accelerating Ethereum ecosystem. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis in increments up to $25,000. To apply for a ConsenSys Grant please fill out an application.

Meet Our Board

Aya Miyaguchi
Executive Director, Ethereum Foundation
Aya Miyaguchi ConsenSys Grants
Andreas Wallendahl
Co -Founder, Kauri
Andreas Wallendahl ConsenSys Grants
Kevin Owocki
Founder, Scientist, Chief Janitor, Gitcoin
Kevin Owocki ConsenSys Grants
Ken Ng
Grants Team, Ethereum Foundation
Ken Ng ConsenSys Grants
Kartik Talwar
Partner, A.Capital Ventures
Kartik Talwar ConsenSys Grants
Danny Ryan
Researcher, Ethereum Foundation
Danny Ryan ConsenSys Grants
Allison Berke
Executive Director, Stanford Cyber Initiative
Allison Berke ConsenSys Grants
Tonya Evans
UNH School of Law
TonyaEvans ConsenSys Grants

ConsenSys Grants FAQ

What is the process for applying?

Once your team has applied, you will receive a confirmation email and can view your application’s status within Submittable. We will have multiple internal review rounds, and if your application passes we will then reach out to you for an interview.

How many steps are there in the process?

Once applicants apply, the applicants move through four evaluation stages. In each stage, an application is moved forward to the next stage or denied. The applicant is only notified during the process if their application does not move forward to the next round. The award is decided after the 4th stage which is an interview.

How long is the grants process once we apply?

The process is typically 3 months from application to award.

What does a good application look like?

We are a private business, can we apply?

 Yes, private businesses are welcome to apply but should only apply for ConsenSys Grants funding if what they plan to build will be open source. 

We are a team of individuals, not a business entity can we still apply?

Yes.

Our team plans to launch a token sale, is it eligible for a grant?

No.

Our team was denied in another Wave, can we still apply?

Sure, you are open to re-applying in 2020. We are unable to give teams individual feedback but we urge you to revisit the criteria and your application before you re-apply.

How long is project delivery if accepted?

Project delivery is contingent upon your milestones. Three months is standard but we are open to support projects that extend past three months.

Are projected funded in USD or DAI?

Projects are funded in DAI via Gitcoin Grants

What happens when we win a ConsenSys Grants Hackathon?

If your team wins a hackathon, the team still must apply to ConsenSys Grants. After applying your team’s application will be fast tracked in the application process but you will be notified of your status at the same time as other teams moving through the process. 

How are payments distributed?

We use Gitcoin Grants to distribute payments. Gitcoin Grants is a separate tool from the traditional Gitcoin bounty product that allows a team to receive individual payments or streams of payment that are not tied to any particular GitHub issue. It also provides a mechanism for projects to raise additional funds from external donors should they so choose. Think of Gitcoin Grants as an Ethereum-powered Open Collective.