Open-source contributions are the lifeblood of the Chainlink Network and the many blockchain based projects working towards a future where smart contracts are the dominant form of digital agreement. It’s why in July 2020, we launched the Chainlink Community Grant Program as a means of providing ongoing financial support to developers building key Chainlink Network infrastructure, and in August 2020, we began a Bug Bounty Program through Gitcoin to expand our support across the entire blockchain community in order to help strengthen Chainlink’s security.

We know that we can only achieve our goals by supporting both the Chainlink ecosystem and the wider open-source blockchain development community, as the success of both is dependent on one another. To further our support, we are proud to announce that Chainlink is sponsoring and helping fund Gitcoin Grants’ on-going Round 7 initiative by becoming a matching partner, allowing us to contribute to the wide variety of community-selected projects through Gitcoin’s Quadratic Funding mechanism.

Quadratic funding is an innovative democratized funding model that allocates more funds to projects with a broad number of independent donors, rather than a select few large donors. This ensures that the blockchain and DeFi community as a whole determines which projects get the most funding without having to worry about a small clique of well-capitalized whales overriding them.

We at Chainlink are providing additional funds to Gitcoin Grants Round 7, which will be used to match individual donor contributions to popular projects. Donations can be boosted up to 1.4X in Round 7, resulting in significantly increased funding for popular projects that have broad community support. As a result, each individual donation by users to projects will result in larger matching support, ultimately supercharging the growth of open-source projects, decentralized infrastructure, and community outreach programs alike.

We believe supporting open-source development is a fundamental responsibility, especially if blockchain infrastructure is to retain its value as a mission-critical public good that benefits society as a whole. By continuing and expanding our future efforts in supporting the broader blockchain open-source community, both the Chainlink ecosystem and the entire blockchain industry as a whole benefits from more innovative and readily accessible infrastructure that can power a better, more decentralized world.

We look forward to joining alongside the current matching donors who are helping aid in the funding of Gitcoin Grants Round 7, and are truly excited to see what impactful projects the community funds.

There is still time to propose a project for Round 7: https://gitcoin.co/grants/new

You can also support the community by donating to the grant requests: https://gitcoin.co/grants/

We’d like to thank our community and the wider Ethereum and blockchain ecosystem for their support. We’re excited to empower developers everywhere to create secure decentralized systems that enable us to redefine our industry with hybrid smart contracts.