This month, we've got the latest on from two groups doing great work to grow the Ethereum ecosystem!

Couger for education and community building in Japan

Specializing in AI, Couger might seem like an unlikely champion of Ethereum education! However, Couger has not only explored the intersection of Ethereum and AI and piloted a zero knowledge voting protocol - they've also become avid educators and collaborators in their native Japan. Couger received a sponsorship in 2020 for their ETHTerakoya meetups as well as a series of workshops and working groups. Couger was recently awarded a second grant to continue and expand upon their previous work, including:

• ID x Voting x Blockchain” working group bringing together corporate, technical and legal professionals to work on open standards and proofs of concept: meeting notes in Japanese and English
• Public workshop presenting findings of the IDxVoting working group meetings: notes in Japanese and English and full video of the presentation (split into part 1 and part 2)
• Working group on eth2 convened in November 2020: notes in Japanese and English
• Planned commmunity building initiatives targeting students, enterprise and general public awareness

Watch ethereum-terakoya.org for upcoming events and meeting notes. We're looking forward to seeing these initiatives develop, and continuing to expand our support for Japan's growing Ethereum ecosystem!

MetaCartel for post-hackathon support

The MetaCartel DAO is a community of builders working to accelerate the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly at the application layer. In 2020 MetaCartel put special focus on helping hackathon participants to continue developing software and dapps after the hackathon is over. ESP grant funds were awarded in the form of a contribution to the MetaCartel DAO to be allocated toward post-hackathon support, particularly for projects emerging from the ETHOnline virtual hackathon.

In addition to providing mentorship as teams refine their products and build sustainable business models, MetaCartel DAO gave small grants to ETHOnline projects including:

• Llama, a crypto community treasury hub
• Mindful, a platform automating portfolio rebalancing and dollar cost averaging
• Overlay, a derivatives protocol using on-chain oracles to enable trading on data streams

Keep track of MetaCartel's many initiatives, not to mention their notorious memes, on Twitter @Meta_Cartel or via their Substack newsletter.