Tezos Foundation announces the third cohort of its Ecosystem Grants Program

The Tezos Foundation completed the third cohort of its Ecosystem Grants Program, issuing 21 new grants to 16 different projects. This program intends to offer financial support to projects building applications or developer tools for the Tezos protocol, as well as those increasing awareness of the Tezos ecosystem through education or marketing efforts. Among the beneficiaries was the development team Breaking Bad, which received separate grants for each of its works-in-progress, including a module for atomic swaps, a decentralized version of GitHub, and an interactive notebook based in Michelson, one of Tezos’ smart contract languages.

Why it matters:

• Funding ecosystem development is a necessary component for Layer-1 smart contract platforms to catch up to (or at least keep pace with) Ethereum in terms of a user and developer base. Despite launching three years after Ethereum, the Tezos Foundation’s pockets are deep enough to help win developer attention. Per its last transparency report in Aug. 2019, the foundation holds over $650 million in various assets, 15% of which is kept in XTZ (~$128 million at today's prices).
• Tezos Foundation’s Ecosystem Grants Program is steadily gaining more traction. Grant requests were up ~140%, and grants issued increased 50% between the second and third cohorts. This growth could reflect the increase in attention given to Tezos by staking services and crypto exchanges (a potential catalyst for its recent price action).
• This new cohort announcement comes only a few days after the Tezos Foundation released a mainnet token faucet, reminiscent of some of the early Bitcoin faucets. The Tezos faucet allows users to acquire small amounts of Tezos tokens (it releases 0.01 tez every ten seconds) for development and testing purposes. It seems the foundation is ramping up its efforts to accelerate ecosystem development.