Ethereum Foundation pauses $3 million 'open grants' program as it looks to redirect funding

The Ethereum Foundation is pausing its open grants programs, initially launched in 2018. According to an announcement on Friday, the so-called Ecosystem Support Program awarded over $3 million across over 100 projects in grants alone.

"Our mission is to enable work that strengthens Ethereum’s foundations and empowers future builders, in domains such as developer tooling, research, community building, infrastructure, and open standards," the foundation wrote in a blog post signed by the Ecosystem Support Program.

"[A]s an open grants program with a lean team and broad scope, the high volume of inbound applications has consumed most of our time and resources, leaving limited capacity to pursue new strategic opportunities," Friday's blog reads.

Much of the funding the EF supported through grants involved finding technical and scalable problems to the world's most used chain, including developer tools like Commit-Boost, an analytics program called BundleBear, and cutting-edge cryptographic research like ZK Playbook.

The program also funded the semi-official Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, a collection of Ethereum cultural, academic, and technical leaders that worked to spread information about Ethereum and the foundation.

While it is difficult to determine how much worth of grants that EF supplied over the years — largely due to discrepancies in naming conventions, like community outreach, education, and technical research — one recent report shows that in 2023, EF's largest expenditure was on “new institutions,” totaling $47.4 million compared to $28.6 million in 2022.

An even more recent financial report indicated the organization intended to spend approximately 15% of the treasury funds while also aiming to maintain a 2.5-year spending buffer in fiat terms, gradually reducing the spending ratio thereafter towards a sustainable level of around 5% per year.

Overall, the grants program overhaul appears to be part and parcel of the Ethereum Foundation's recommitment to running a leaner and more focused organization. Perhaps most notably, the organization hired co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak to lead the organization.

Over the coming months, Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei will focus on scaling the Ethereum mainnet and blobs, the transaction storage system, as well as pushing UX improvements, including at the Layer 2 interoperability and application layers.

"We remain deeply committed to supporting the Ethereum ecosystem and the public goods that sustain it. While these changes mark a new chapter for ESP, we are energized by the opportunities ahead to better support the incredible builders, researchers, and contributors driving Ethereum’s growth," the blog added.

Correction: Story and headline updated to specify EF's open grants program.