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 particular, we actively support initiatives that help new smart contract developers join the ecosystem and assist existing developers by simplifying the development experience. A large part of this means directly investing in the infrastructure and frameworks needed to develop hybrid smart contracts and create Web 3.0 enabled user-facing interfaces, as well as updating and maintaining existing key developer tools. One such tool widely used by smart contract developers today is web3.js, the official JavaScript library for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain.

With the collection of libraries provided by web3.js, developers can create a website or client application that interacts with an Ethereum node’s JSON RPC via HTTP, WebSocket, or IPC connection. This developer framework is commonly used for facilitating user interactions with the Ethereum blockchain such as sending tokens from one address to another, reading and writing data from smart contracts, deploying new smart contracts, and more. Importantly, web3.js abstracts away the complexity of low-level JSON-RPC calls, allowing developers to interact with an Ethereum node using plain JavaScript. 

Because web3.js plays such a crucial role in the creation of widely used dApps, including numerous Chainlinked protocols, we are excited to announce that ChainSafe, a leading blockchain protocol and infrastructure development firm, has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant for the expansion and maintenance of the web3.js framework, including providing modern web support by bundling web3.js and Ethers so that both can be trivially imported into a modern TypeScript project as well as updating the developer documentation to offer TypeScript instructions. 

ChainSafe is a leading blockchain-focused development firm that provides engineering support for a wide range of open-source software projects building on any number of chains. Supported by a team of software developers with diverse technical backgrounds, ChainSafe has extensive experience building blockchain-focused software, including the Ethereum 2.0 Typescript implementation Lodestar, the Filecoin node Rust implementation Forest, the Polkadot host Golang implementation Gossamer, the Rust implementation of Mina, as well as the Ethereum JavaScript API Web3.js. ChainSafe previously received a Chainlink community grant to expand the Chainlink oracle pallet on Polkadot as well as the integration of Chainlink oracles into the Cosmos SDK, proving their knowledge of blockchain infrastructure.

The community grant will further strengthen the working relationship with ChainSafe, who will continue building key smart contract infrastructure including the integration of Chainlink on multiple blockchain networks. This grant serves as just one of the many developer ecosystem focused grants to come into the future, supporting the smart contract ecosystem as a whole. If you are interested in building infrastructure for the community, submit an application to the Community Grant Program.

“We are proud to have received a Chainlink grant to modernize and improve the widely used web3.js framework, ensuring developers have the refined tooling they require to build decentralized applications,” stated Aidan Hyman, Co-founder and CEO of ChainSafe. “By leveraging our deep expertise of blockchain infrastructure and the web3.js framework, the funding awarded from this grant will provide the resources required to maintain the tooling used by thousands of Solidity developers in the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower more and more Chainlink ecosystem teams, researchers, and social impact projects that are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of hybrid 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.