Tezos Foundation announces the fourth cohort of its Ecosystem Grants Program

The Tezos Foundation has announced its fourth cohort of ecosystem grants, issuing funds 18 development teams and projects. This grant program offers financial support to projects building on the Tezos protocol, and this round had a particular focus on teams working to boost smart contract development for DeFi applications.

Some beneficiaries included development team Agile Ventures, who are building a decentralized name service akin to ENS (Ethereum Name Service) called Tezos Domains. Madfish Solutions also received funds to continue its various projects such as sol2ligo, a transpiler that aims to make it easier for developers to migrate Solidity smart contracts from Ethereum to Tezos.

Why it matters:

• Tezos has dominated the staking market to date, even surpassing EOS in the total value of assets locked in staking a few months ago. But its network is still well behind the likes of Ethereum in terms of application development and smart contract tooling.
• The Tezos Foundation seems keen on accelerating its application ecosystem by deploying part of its massive treasury to help overcome some of Tezos’ remaining development pain points. It also makes sense to hone in on DeFi while the iron is hot. If high fees on Ethereum persist, there’s a non-zero chance some users or upcoming projects turn to alternative platforms instead of Ethereum’s bevy of Layer-2 scaling solutions.