The Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building a more functional, accessible, and socially impactful Chainlink Network. In order to fuel the growth of the Chainlink community and accelerate the adoption of hybrid smart contracts, the Chainlink grant program continues to support work that makes it easier, faster, and more efficient to build and test new smart contracts and applications.

In pursuit of this goal, we actively support initiatives that help new smart contract developers join the ecosystem and learn how to best leverage Chainlink oracles. Part of this means investing in the infrastructure and frameworks needed to develop hybrid smart contracts and create new tools, as well as updating and maintaining existing key developer tools. One such tool that is commonly used by smart contract developers is Hardhat, an Ethereum development environment for professionals.

With the Hardhat framework, developers can run Solidity code locally, initiate tests, and debug smart contracts without dealing with live in-production environments. Hardhat provides developers extreme flexibility and the ability to extend the framework with additional plugins to address any project’s specific needs. Trusted by top teams such as Aave, Synthetix, PoolTogether, OpenZeppelin, Optimism, and more, Hardhat is a widely used developer tool by Chainlinked protocols and applications.

For this reason, we are excited to announce that Applied Blockchain, a research and development firm, has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant for the expansion and maintenance of the Chainlink Hardhat Starter Kit, a toolkit for building Chainlinked smart contracts. By improving this key developer framework, the process of creating Chainlink-powered applications that leverage on-chain Data Feeds, verifiable randomness, or the ability to call any external API is simplified for development teams, expediting the time it takes to deploy into production.

Applied Blockchain is a team of engineers, designers, and advisors who have the unique expertise in building blockchain-based infrastructure together with the use of cryptography to provide users greater trust in the code deployed. Trusted by global organizations, Applied Blockchain has a significant degree of knowledge required for maintaining and upgrading key development frameworks. For this reason, we believe Applied Blockchain is the ideal firm to spearhead the improvement of the Chainlink Hardhat toolkit.

This community grant is the beginning of a strong working relationship with Applied Blockchain, who will continue building key infrastructure and developer tooling through future grants on additional initiatives. Additionally, Chainlink will continue supporting the creation of key developer tools and we recommend any development firms interested in building Chainlink infrastructure to apply for a community grant here.

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower more and more Chainlink ecosystem teams, researchers, and social impact projects who are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of universally connected smart contracts, secure oracle networks, and impactful technology that improves the world. We will continue supporting the community as a key driver of Chainlink’s rapid growth, because only together can we make universally connected, hybrid smart contracts into the dominant form of digital agreement.

About the Chainlink Grant Program

If you want to learn more about the Grant Program, check out our recent blog post that further expands upon its goals and the criteria for submission. If you would like to participate in the Chainlink Grant Program, please apply here. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in cash and/or LINK.