Ethereum Startup Offers Grants to Open Blockchain Developers

Autonomous financing project String Labs has announced a program to award grants to developers working with Ethereum.

As part of the effort to seed open blockchain finance projects – permissioned ledgers need not apply – the California-based company will award an unspecified number of grants, ranging between $2,000 and $10,000.

String Labs CEO Tom Ding described in interview why the project is choosing to only support open blockchains, telling CoinDesk:

"Private chains can be more about optimizing time and cost for institutions, but most of the time it doesn’t benefit end users. Permissionless innovation benefits from that."

The grant program is intended to support permissionless projects on the public Ethereum blockchain underneath any number of open-source licenses similar to MIT’s Open Source Initiative.

As opposed to an investment which would typically result in the financier receiving some sort of equity in exchange, grants winners maintain far more autonomy once they receiving funding.

Examples of the kinds of ideas String Labs wants to fund include financial exchange clients, mobile wallets, peer-to-peer distributed app marketplaces, and other innovative financial protocols.

Ethereum grants grow

The move represents the latest effort to fund development of Ethereum projects through grants.

Last April, the Ethereum Foundation announced a similar program called DEVgrants designed to help developers invest a “significant” amount of time building their projects.

Early winners of that grant include security-deposit based public consensus protocol Casper, which won $25k, and “Snappy”, an Ethereum framework being developed by Internet of Things startup Slock.it, best known for writing the code that underlies The DAO distributed autonomous organization.

Founded in mid-2015, String Labs is asking grant applications to provide concepts that are deliverable within a six-to-twelve month period. Proposals must be submitted by 31st June.

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