Ethereum Community Fund (ECF) launches to shape strategic adoption

The Ethereum Community Fund (ECF), a new initiative from early protocol supporters has launched. The goal is to provide both funding and connectivity, while shaping the strategic direction of the space towards mainstream adoption, through the development of infrastructure and powerful end-user applications.

The first step towards supporting the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem will an infrastructure grant program. This program will be established as a permanent financial endowment to support and aid projects in building crucial open-source infrastructure, tooling, and applications.

The following originating members consists of valued and respected founders and advisors, and major stakeholders with experience and deep understanding of the dynamics of the blockchain space. They choose to align together to establish the ECF in order to support the Ethereum network, the platform that allowed their ideas to persevere and prosper.

Members include:

Co-creator of Tendermint and Co-founder of Cosmos, Jae Kwon;
Founder of Golem, Julian Zawistowski;
Founder of OmiseGO, Jun Hasegawa;
Founder of Maker, Rune Christensen;
The CEO and Founder of one of Japan’s largest VC’s, Global Brain Blockchain Lab, Yasuhiko Yurimoto

Advisors include the Founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin; the Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, Ayako Miyaguchi; and the Managing Director of OmiseGO, Vansa Chatikavan.

Piotr Janiuk, Golem’s CTO:

“Scalability is essential to us because the more scalable Ethereum is, the less code to facilitate said scaling has to be implemented in the Golem protocol. Which is precisely the right way to go, as this will allow Golem to provide its functionality using the existing infrastructure without the need of duplicating/reimplementing parts of this infrastructure. We are aware of this, and even as we speak, we are cooperating closely with projects whose aim is to improve the infrastructure scalability (e.g., by providing additional, scalable off-chain layers).“

“The production-ready web-3 stack is crucial for many Dapps, including Golem. And in this context, a reliable and efficient implementation of the p2p library is of great value.“

“Ethereum and related technologies are constantly evolving, and even though regular users enjoy its advantages now, there is still a lot of room for UX improvements. The same applies to the development and integration tools for developers that, at this stage, are at least just as important. All the above makes the ECF not only an interesting idea but a significant piece of the development effort, which may result in significant cohesion between technologies built around Ethereum/smart contracts/blockchain.”

Julian Zawistowski, Golem’s CEO

“I believe that this alliance towards the greater good of the ecosystem marks the start of a new chapter for cooperation between projects building on Ethereum technology. We have to remember that what we are doing is possible thanks to Ethereum and that it depends on that platform. This is why we owe Ethereum a lot and we feel obliged to support the continuous growth of the ecosystem and its crucial infrastructure. Golem’s community is part of the Ethereum community and, as a result, part of this endeavor. We are honored to be a part of this initiative with our prominent partners and look forward to the bright future ahead.”