Ethereum Foundation: need for scaling progress is more and more urgent

7 years ago - Published in Fintech Land

The non-profit that oversees development of ethereum has officially unveiled two subsidy programs that will support research on how to grow the number of transactions its blockchain can process.

In a blog post published Tuesday, ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin described how the network is beginning to reach 1 million transactions per day. The foundation invites teams of developers, companies, and universities to apply for subsidy amounts between $50,000 and $1,000,000, rewarding participants for committing their resources to expanding the capacity of the ecosystem. Subsidies would be awarded based on merit, alongside the scope, scale, and quality of the project’s impact.

Ethereum is the leading blockchain in the current market, and the Ethereum Foundation unveiled the program as the blockchain surpassed 1 million transactions per day.

In the blog post, Buterin explained the current challenges faced by the blockchain network with the increasing number of transactions, and then suggested two ways to overcome these challenges and make the network more efficient. He also pointed out that “the single most important key technical challenge” that blockchain developers should work on before the mass adaptation of the technology is the scaling of the network.

The goal of the Foundation is to encourage developments that would make the Ethereum blockchain more robust. One of the two mentioned subsidized programs is to implement the sharding mechanism for scaling the network, while the other is to develop layer-2 protocols which will work on the top of the present blockchain.

Applicants are asked to submit their official project’s name, name of the applicant, and a list of core developers to the foundation via email. The application should also include a proposal regarding the project’s impact on scalability, background information on the team such as any cryptographic-, blockchain-, or Ethereum-related work, as well as a timeline, an estimated budget and a grant request.