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.

With the Spring 2021 Chainlink Virtual Hackathon kicking off this week, we’re excited to announce that Protofire, a development workshop for decentralized protocols, has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant for their work in creating a new testnet token faucet that is now live across a number of blockchains, including on the Polygon, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and xDai testnets. In addition to the Chainlink’s token faucets on the Ethereum Rinkeby and Kovan testnets, this new testnet faucet allows developers to acquire mock Chainlink tokens (LINK) from an intuitive user interface to test their Chainlinked smart contracts across a number of blockchain testnets before deploying onto the mainnet network of their choice.

As a result of this Chainlink grant-funded initiative, all developers participating in the Chainlink Virtual hackathon now have new infrastructure to build and test externally connected dApps across a number of leading smart contract platforms. This new token faucet constructed by Protofire has been designed to scale up and support any EVM-compatible blockchain testnets on demand. This multi-chain functionality has become increasingly important as Chainlink continues to natively launch within additional blockchain environments. By supporting developer best practices and providing seamless access to testnet LINK tokens, the new faucet tooling rapidly increases the rate at which smart contracts get created and deployed.

As a part of the Chainlink community grant, Protofire has built several key components to enhance the faucet, including:

• Develop an EVM-compatible testnet token faucet with a Solidity smart contract that supports the ERC677 token contract and an off-chain system that initiates transfers.
• Deploy and validate the testnet token faucet on the Polygon, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and xDai testnet networks alongside mock testnet tokens to start.
• Create a user-interface that allows developers to request testnet LINK tokens to an arbitrary address of their choice and validate the user with Google CAPTCHA.

Protofire is a widely recognized provider of development and consultancy around blockchain technology, offering expertise from extensive experience around building decentralized protocols, developer tools, and smart contracts. Their team has contributed development resources to leading blockchain-based projects such as Gnosis, The Graph, Maker, Tezos, 0x, Kyber Network, Synthetix, and more. We have previously awarded Protofire grants for the integration of Chainlink oracles into both the xDai blockchain and the Avalanche network, proving their ability to deploy Chainlink infrastructure into new blockchain environments.

“We’re proud to have been awarded a Chainlink community grant for the development and deployment of a testnet token faucet onto EVM chains to bring mock tokens onto various testnets,” stated Manuel García, CEO at Protofire. “As an experienced development workshop in the blockchain space, we deeply understand both the inner workings of EVM-compatible blockchains and how the Chainlink Network has been designed to ensure maximum tamper-resistance at all times. We used this knowledge to ensure developers have access to a proper testing environment to validate the integrity of their Chainlinked applications.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower more and more Chainlink ecosystem teams and researchers who are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of universally connected smart contracts and secure oracle networks. We will continue supporting the community as a key driver of Chainlink’s rapid growth, because only together can we make universally connected 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.