Funding the Core - The Daily Gwei #319
Funding the Core - The Daily Gwei #319
Ethereum's core is critical to its long-term success - so let's ensure we fund it appropriately.
Today, the Ethereum Foundation announced that 6 entities - Compound, Kraken, Lido, Synthetix, The Graph and Uniswap - have come together to donate $250,000 each ($1.5 million total) to Ethereum execution-layer client teams. This money comes on top of the support that these teams already receive from the Ethereum Foundation itself.
You may have noticed that the tweet above uses this rather new “execution-layer” terminology that you might not be used to seeing so let me break it down for you. Once the eth1 and eth2 chains are merged together, there will be 1 holistic Ethereum that is split into the ‘execution-layer’ and ‘consensus-layer’. The execution layer is responsible for executing things such as running smart contract code & processing transactions and the consensus layer is responsible for managing the PoS consensus of the Beacon Chain (aka coming to consensus on blocks). Each of these layers have their own clients with the execution layer consisting of the Geth, Erigon, Nethermind, Besu, Nimbus and other “eth1 clients” while the consensus layer consists of Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus and Lodstar which are the “eth2 clients”.
Okay now back to the announcement - how awesome is it that the projects building on top of Ethereum are supporting the core development of it? Of course, this isn’t the first time this has happened (many projects have been Gitcoin Grants matching partners in the past), but I think this still sends a strong signal that the wider ecosystem takes the development of these core clients seriously - and why wouldn’t they? Without the thankless work that the core researchers and developers do for Ethereum we probably wouldn’t even have a functioning ecosystem! It’s also worth noting that the Ethereum network has 100% uptime (yes, really - 100%) which is a testament to the hard work these teams have put in over the years.
In saying all of this, funding is only one part of the core development equation. One other critical part is that core development work is hard and finding the right people to work on protocol-layer technology can be even harder. There are various initiatives being run at the moment such as the core developer apprenticeship program which hope to recruit new core developers, but getting these new people up to speed can be very time-consuming. Though in saying that, all I’ve seen and heard from existing core developers is that they are more than happy to help onboard as many people as possible - they really do care deeply about their work.
I would love to see more regular funding for the client teams outside of the support they already receive from the Ethereum Foundation. Ideally it’d be in the form of rotating donations every quarter from different teams in the ecosystem to ensure that we continue to support and fund the multi-client ecosystem that Ethereum has been fostering since day 1. In the meantime, I will continue to donate to these teams during Gitcoin Grants matching rounds and I hope you will too.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.