The beauty of blockchains and smart contracts is the global, open-source nature of their development, with developers from around the world working together to make their underlying infrastructure more secure, increasingly functional, and easier to adopt for new users. It’s why blockchains like Ethereum have morphed into public goods, supporting numerous decentralized applications (dApps) that are currently enhancing how users monetize and exchange value across various market segments.

In support of open-source development, we are proud to join the upcoming Gitcoin Grants Round 10 as a matching partner. Our financial contributions will go towards the development of Ethereum infrastructure that the Ethereum community has deemed most important via Gitcoin’s quadratic funding model. By democratizing funding, Gitcoin incentivizes developers to build key infrastructure and tooling such as open-source programming libraries, lightweight Ethereum clients, new Ethereum 2.0 implementations, more reliable monitoring tools, new testing suites and deployment tooling, and more. Gitcoin also provides financial compensation via open-source grants for the maintenance of highly critical existing infrastructure to ensure Ethereum dApps remain secure and operational at all times.

This comes as part of our continued effort to provide financial resources directly to developers in the Ethereum and wider smart contract ecosystem, such as through other Gitcoin Funding rounds, bug bounty programs, and hackathons. Additionally, the Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial support to the many development teams and researchers building solutions for the Chainlink Network. We encourage talented individual developers and development teams to apply to the grant program here, or if you are an academic researcher and want to collaborate, contact us.

Democratizing Financial Support for Ethereum Developers

On top of Gitcoin having a high participation rate amongst the Ethereum community, one of the other key reasons that Chainlink continues to support it is their use of a quadratic funding model. The quadratic funding model works by prioritizing projects with the largest number of individual donors from the community while still having security mechanisms in place to mitigate voter manipulation. Thus, regardless of their donation size, each individual donor can signal their support for a project and directly influence the amount of funding that project receives. Gitcoin’s quadratic funding model democratizes funding, ensuring that all Ethereum community members can determine which projects have the most impact and deserve funding.

Because of the infrastructure maturation of Ethereum and other blockchains, we are seeing hybrid smart contracts harness value for users in financial, insurance, gaming, and various other markets. Hybrid smart contracts combine blockchains with external data and off-chain computations from oracles to create more scalable, confidential, fair, and universally connected decentralized applications.

Emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) projects are already using hybrid smart contracts to challenge traditional finance by offering anyone around the world with an internet connection access to financial products and higher yields while still giving users full control over their assets and full transparency of the risks. Moreover, Chainlink-powered parametric insurance products are providing universal access to crop insurance, even in regions of the world without developed legal systems or traditional forms of insurance. We also see new carbon credit systems being powered by Chainlink oracles, which incentivize people to participate in regenerative agriculture through hybrid smart contracts.

Ultimately, the capabilities of on-chain applications are dependent on the underlying infrastructure and tooling available to developers. Hence, why we are actively supporting infrastructure projects on Ethereum through the Gitcoin program. We look forward to funding more infrastructure initiatives in the future across Ethereum and other blockchain networks, as well as empowering smart contract developers through consistent provisioning of new decentralized oracle services.

How to Join Gitcoin Grants Round 10

There is still time to propose a project to be eligible for Round 10 funding: https://gitcoin.co/grants/new

Gitcoin Grants Round 10 starts June 16th and finishes July 1st, 2021: https://gitcoin.co/grants/

We want to thank the Chainlink community and the wider blockchain ecosystem for their passionate support and continued efforts in building high-quality open-source infrastructure. We’re honored to provide developers everywhere with the decentralized services needed to create hybrid smart contracts that improve people’s lives around the world.

To find all of our latest updates visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.

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