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 program continues to support work that makes it easier, faster, and more efficient to build and test new smart contract applications.

In pursuit of this goal, we actively support initiatives that simplify the experience of working with blockchain-based applications, help new smart contract developers join the ecosystem, and assist existing developers in securing their Chainlinked smart contract applications. Part of this involves deploying resources to support the end-to-end infrastructure developers need to compile, deploy, test, and debug smart contracts, such as environments that help them manage and automate recurring tasks. This infrastructure enables developers to go into production with their Chainlink integrations with the confidence that they will operate as intended.

With this in mind, we are excited to announce that the Nomic Foundation has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant to further enhance the Ethereum developer experience and build long-term infrastructure such as Hardhat that will catalyze organic growth in the Ethereum developer tooling ecosystem.

Nomic Foundation (previously Nomic Labs) is a non-profit organization founded with the support of the Ethereum Foundation, Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase, Consensys, The Graph, Polygon, Gnosis, a16z, a_capital, Kaszek Ventures, Chainlink, and others to build Ethereum development tooling and empower developers to decentralize global systems through permissionless, trust-minimized applications. As part of this grant, Nomic Labs will become the Nomic Foundation, and will further enhance the suite of development tools available in Hardhat, building long-term infrastructure that further cultivates organic growth in the smart contract ecosystem and decreases the dependency of Ethereum infrastructure on specific organizations to build and maintain core components.

With simplified smart contract application creation and management processes and flexible, extensible, and fast tooling for compiling, testing, and debugging Ethereum software, developers can save on development costs, reduce their go-to-market time, and stay competitive in a rapidly changing smart contract landscape. An enhanced developer platform with a more robust set of development tools will enable a better development process for smart contract engineers, ultimately benefitting the entire Web3 ecosystem through a higher standard of application security.

“We’re excited to receive a Chainlink Community Grant to improve and expand Ethereum’s developer platform and further support the growth of projects that are critical to the long-term sustainability of the smart contract ecosystem,” stated Nomic Foundation Co-Founder and CEO Franco Zeoli. “Expanding the mission-critical development tooling available to new and existing smart contract developers helps to create a more accommodating developer experience in the blockchain ecosystem and empowers developers to focus on their core tasks without having to make compromises on quality and reliability.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower Chainlink ecosystem teams, researchers, and social impact projects that are 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, read this 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.