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, assist existing developers in improving their workflow, and generally provide education on how to best leverage Chainlink oracles in decentralized applications. A large part of this means investing in the infrastructure and frameworks needed to develop hybrid smart contracts, as well as creating new developer tooling and keeping existing tooling well maintained and up to date. One tool becoming increasingly popular with smart contract developers is Brownie, a Python-based development and testing framework for smart contracts built for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

The Brownie framework provides developers with a powerful Python-based testing environment for Solidity and Vyper smart contracts that include trace-based coverage evaluation, debugging toolings, and a built-in console for quick project interaction. Python has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world in recent years and is increasingly used by smart contract developers to thoroughly test their decentralized applications before they deploy them on mainnet. Used by a large number of leading Chainlinked applications, Brownie has become a critical piece of developer tooling.

For this reason, we are excited to announce that Brownie has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant for the expansion and maintenance of its Python-based smart contract testing framework. In particular, this grant will provide funding for Brownie to integrate support for the automatic verification of test contracts imported from Github with a Solidity version of 0.8.3 and higher using an Etherscan API key. This enables OpenZeppelin and Chainlink smart contracts imported from Github to be auto-verified for improved robustness.

This expansion of the Brownie development framework is important in making the workflow for Chainlink developers building with Python a seamless experience and follows our approach of increasing support for the most popular programming languages used by developers within the community. With more and more smart contract developers being onboarded into the Chainlink ecosystem through Brownie, the source verification feature will help improve the testing experience and increase the security of the blockchain ecosystem as a whole. 

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower 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.