Ethereum Foundation awards $32.65 million in Q1 grants to over 90 projects

The Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem Support Program (EFESP) has announced the donation of $32.65 million in grants for Q1. In its quarterly allocation report released today, the Foundation said it donated the funds to over 90 projects.

In the report, the Foundation listed the grant recipients, the project they got the funding for, and which category they belonged to. However, the report did not state how much each recipient got.

Still, it is possible to identify what the Foundation cares about by which project category appeared the most in the report. Community & Education appears to be leading with 32 projects.

These projects varied from educational videos about Account Abstraction and the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation to a Privacy Residency in Taipei and a summer school at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on topics related to Ethereum.

Interestingly, the educational events show Ethereum’s global reach through the Foundation as it sponsored hackathons in the USA and Ethiopia while funding educational programs in Italy, India, Greece, and Japan.

Beyond educational and community projects, seven consensus layer projects, such as  GotEth, Fabric, Lighthouse, and Lodestar, also received grants, while 14 cryptography and Zero Knowledge proofs projects got funded.

Other categories that secured funding include Developer experience & tooling, Execution layer projects,  and other projects focused on the general growth and support of the network. Only one Layer-2 project, L2 Beats, secured funding from the grant, with the funds meant to enable the platform to continue providing accurate information about the Ethereum L2 ecosystem.

Recipients praise Ethereum Foundation’s efforts

The report marks the fourth time the Ethereum Foundation has disclosed an allocation report, a practice that started in August last year when it released the Q2 report. The decision to start reporting is likely due to concerns about the Foundation’s expenses.

When the first report was released, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin praised the effort, stating that anyone who wants more details on what the Foundation spends money on should review the report.

So far, many of the recipients of the grants have started acknowledging the grant and praising the effort. Amber Group noted that its Web3 Security Team got two grants for their efforts to improve EVM security.

It posted:

“From enhancing EVM security through Mothra’s reverse engineering toolkit to boosting Geth performance with PebbleDB, we’re proud to keep pushing the boundaries of Ethereum’s security and performance.”

The pseudonymous security expert SunSec also acknowledged that they were part of the ETH Rangers Program, which supports several individuals working on public goods security efforts in the Ethereum ecosystem.

While many recipients have praised the Foundation for the grants, some users believe publicizing the allocation is a good step. However, they want the Foundation to start including how much money it allocated to each project.

Ether back above $2k for the first time since March

Meanwhile, Ether has surpassed $2,000 for the first time since the end of March after seeing over 13% rise in value in the last 24 hours. The massive surge in ETH price comes amidst a general upswing in the crypto market.

However, ETH still stands out as the best performer among all the top ten crypto assets in the last 24 hours. This suggests that Ether might have more factors at play.  A possible catalyst for its gains was the successful Pectra upgrade, which has been the biggest improvement to the network since the merge event.

Nevertheless, it is too early to conclude that the ETH bullish run will last. The token is still down 39% year-to-date and, according to CryptoQuant analysts, faces many headwinds that could hinder price recovery.

Still, the gains represent a positive development, and according to technical analyst Ali Martinez, the major supply barrier for ETH is $2,380. He claimed that clearing this level would start a new bull rally for the asset.

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