By CCN: The Ethereum Foundation announced it is committing $30 million over 12 months as it continues to build Ethereum 2.0. The nonprofit is spreading the funds “on key projects across the ecosystem” with a focus on Ethereum 2.0 (Plasma), supporting Ethereum 1.0, and developers.
The foundation holds 0.6% of all ETH in addition to cash on hand. The Ethereum price took the baton from bitcoin and surged to an eight-month high last week. ETH is up nearly 60% in May alone.
Ethereum 2.0 is no facelift
Ethereum 2.0 is a transformative undertaking involving a great number of partnerships with developers, startups, and academic institutions.
Furthermore, the planned upgrades take an ecosystem-wide view of Ethereum, which is the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency based on market cap as well as the go-to platform for decentralized smart contracts.
Developers, Developers, Developers
The foundation will apply $19 million of the earmarked funds toward “building the Ethereum of tomorrow” over the next year. Moreover, there will be more smart contract languages for programmers. And R&D into zero-knowledge proofs could make Ethereum 2.0 more private and secure.
Additionally, the foundation will fund research for Ethereum “Phase 3 and Beyond.” Ethereum 2.0 started out as a research project too. It moved into the active engineering stage during last year’s crypto winter.
Several ETH 1.0 projects will have the benefit of $8 million in funding from the foundation. This includes a command line tool for developers, a programming language to write smart contracts on Ethereum and other blockchains, and the Ethers.js code library for Ethereum developers.
The remaining $3 million will go to “developers, developers, developers.”
The #Ethereum Foundation is excited to share our plans for the next year, and more.https://t.co/FxJTMsFWGQ
— Ethereum (@ethereum) May 21, 2019
Ethereum Foundation’s “Subtraction Philosophy”
Ethereum’s leaders are striving to “decrease prestige” and “matter less” even as the project spends millions of dollars on partnerships for research and engineering. Ethereum 2.0 will be radically decentralized:
“In plain language, following a philosophy of subtraction means resisting the natural tendency of organizations to grow and accumulate value within themselves, and ensure instead that this value is created outside the Foundation in the broader Ethereum ecosystem.”
Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin won a Thiel Fellowship to advance Ethereum in 2014. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s Subtraction Philosophy seems like the exact opposite of the business philosophy advocated by Peter Thiel in his book, “Zero to One.”
But it’s really not because Ethereum (like Bitcoin which inspired it) is so unique and special. The less the Ethereum Foundation matters, the more Ethereum matters.
The more opportunities the foundation distributes, the more opportunities Ethereum captures. Decentralization is the fundamental quality that makes Ethereum so valuable.
