Open-source software plays a fundamental role in powering Ethereum’s decentralized infrastructure, securing a growing on-chain registry of digital assets and the tens of billions of dollars locked up in DeFi smart contracts. Countless development teams are working tirelessly to create and maintain this open-source software so it can be widely relied on as a public good for storing and exchanging value within business and social processes.

In order to support their work, we are continuously providing financial resources directly to developers in the Ethereum and wider smart contract ecosystem through previous Gitcoin Funding rounds, bug bounty programs, and hackathons. Additionally, the Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building a more functional and accessible Chainlink Network. We encourage talented individual developers and development teams to apply to the grant program here, or if you are a researcher and want to collaborate, contact us.

To further support developers building open-source software, we are proud to join the upcoming Gitcoin Grants Round 9 as a matching partner to fund community-selected projects building infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. Through additional financial support for Ethereum’s top and upcoming infrastructure projects, community members can utilize Gitcoin’s quadratic funding to allocate resources to projects which are collectively believed to provide the most value to the ecosystem. This further advances the goal of Ethereum being a public good that is accessible to any and all, funding initiatives like improved user interfaces, more reliable monitoring tools, new testing suites and deployment tooling, and more. It also supports the maintenance of widely adopted existing infrastructure that keeps decentralized applications operational at all times.

Boosting Community-Supported Projects With Quadratic Funding

A key reason why Chainlink continues to support the Gitcoin Grants program is their use of a quadratic funding model, which allocates a matching partner’s funds to projects in a fair and decentralized manner. It does so by prioritizing projects with the largest number of individual donors from the community, ensuring each and every donor has a voice in how matching funds are allocated to projects, regardless of their donation size. As a result, funding is boosted for projects that have strong community support, leading to more funding for widely used infrastructure projects.

We believe that Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems are on their way to fundamentally changing the way society coordinates economic and social activity via the implementation of new backend infrastructure in the form of decentralized, self-executing smart contract applications. We are already witnessing this through the rapid growth of the DeFi ecosystem over the past year and how it provides users around the world with permissionless access to a wide range of financial services.

Beyond DeFi, we are also seeing a growing diversity of smart contract use cases built on open-source blockchain infrastructure, such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), insurance, gaming, and more being created by passionate teams. We look forward to continuing our support of Ethereum and its widely relied on infrastructure, both through our technical innovation of decentralized oracles and the funding of platforms such as Gitcoin.

How to Join Gitcoin Grants Round 9

There is still time to propose a project to be eligible for Round 9 funding: https://gitcoin.co/grants/new

Gitcoin Grants Round 9 will begin on March 10th and run for 15 days: https://gitcoin.co/grants/

We’d like to thank our community and the wider Ethereum and blockchain ecosystem for their passionate support. We’re excited to empower developers everywhere to create secure, decentralized systems that enable us to redefine our industry with universally connected smart contracts, ultimately improving the lives of people around the world.

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