Ethereum is very much a global community, but within that larger ecosystem lives a vast and vibrant web of local, grassroots communities.
These local community nodes are a Schelling point for thousands of Ethereans, often organized around a shared geography, language, or on-the-ground meetup. They're also a gateway for onboarding thousands of soon-to-be Ethereans, be it through meetups, talks, hackathons, study groups, and the like. Which means they're home to countless opportunities for growing the ecosystem. As such, the Ethereum Foundation is continuously exploring ways to support and learn from local communities.
To this end, the EF has piloted the concept of "Local Grant waves", where we work in tandem with organizers to coordinate a fixed-length, community-focused open call for proposals.
The EF has trialed local grants in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and most recently, in 2020, Honduras and Colombia. Today, we're excited to share the recipient roundup for Honduras and Colombia!
Honduras 🇭🇳
| Grantee(s) | Project | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Francisco R. Nuñez | Honduras-Crafts Market Supply Chain | Community | A pilot project helping local artisans to sell their products internationally, while giving customers a way to validate that the crafts have been made by Honduran artisans and Honduran materials. |
| Shy Panda | Shy Panda | dApp | An Ethereum-based donation platform helping animal protection organizations source funds from donors all over the world |
| Juan Mayen | Spanish Content Production | Community / Education | A series of Ethereum-related education articles for the Spanish-speaking community |
| StablePay | StablePay Layer 2 SDK | Devtool / Infrastructure | An open SDK to abstract away the complexities of all Layer 2 integrations into a single web3-like library that users can use and extend |
| MacaoTech | MacaoTech | Community / Education | Organizing local Ethereum study groups and educational workshops |
| Ballotted | Ballotted | dApp | A mobile voting app that helps individuals and organizations easily run secure, transparent, and fully auditable elections by using smart contracts |
| Oscar Fonseca | Decentralized Transparency Platform | dApp | A transparent and traceable funding platform allowing donors to track the usage of funds and the progress of funded projects |
| Rodimiro Cerrato Espinal | Testeur: A generalized network-based Blockchain protocol testing tool | Devtool / Infrastructure | A simulation and testing tool which enables developers to quickly set up a confined, fast, and close-to-real environment with all the required services pre-configured |
Colombia 🇨🇴
| Grantee(s) | Project | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organizers of Ethereum Bogotá, Caribe, and Medellín meetup communities | Local community events | Community / Education | Continued growth and development of local Ethereum communities in Colombia |
| Nethereum | Onboarding .NET Devs to Ethereum | Community / Education | Creating Spanish developer content to help onboard .NET engineers to the Ethereum ecosystem. |
| Diego Mazo | Descubriendo Blockchain | Community / Education | Continued development of Descrubiendo Blockchain, a Devcon-backed series of Spanish-speaking educational videos covering the basics of Ethereum. |
| TRU | TRU academic certificates | Research | Mapping out the opportunities and challenges around the use case of issuing Colombian university diplomas on Ethereum |
| Cristian Gil & Juan David Reyes Páez | State of the Crypto Ecosystem in Colombia: Findings from a local perspective | Research | A case study report investigating real-world examples of how crypto is being used in Colombia today, with the aim of helping governments and social impact organizations better understand Ethereum and blockchain technology. |
| Bram Dufour, Santiago Vallejo Toro, Edwin Valencia Toro | ETS (Emissions Trading System) for Colombia using Blockchain | Research | An analysis of the use case of an Ethereum-based Emission Trading System (ETS), with the aim of helping Colombian governments and related organizations better understand the use case |
Looking ahead
Thank you to all applicants, the organizers who collaborated on these rounds, and especially to Cristian Espinoza Garner who last year served as lead organizer for Honduras Local Grants!
Local communities are contributing to Ethereum in powerful ways, from onboarding developers, to building tools around novel use cases, producing documentation in a myriad of languages, and welcoming new builders and users to Ethereum. The state of the Ethereum community is strong, thanks in no small part to these contributions. In 2021, we look forward to continuing to support what is a seemingly endless source of energy, innovation, and inspiration. The work has just begun!
If you'd like to tell us what you're working on, drop us a line at LocalGrants@ethereum.org.