Ethereum is a global community, but within this larger ecosystem lives a vast and vibrant network of grassroots local communities.
These local community nodes are a Schelling Point for thousands of Ethereans, often organized around a common geography, language or encounter on the ground. They also provide a gateway to integrate thousands of future Ethereals, whether through meetings, discussions, hackathons, study groups, etc. Which means they are home to countless opportunities for ecosystem growth. As such, the Ethereum Foundation continually explores ways to support and learn from local communities.
To this end, the FE 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 FE has tested local grants in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and, most recently in 2020, Honduras and Colombia. Today we are excited to share the list of recipients from Honduras and Colombia!
Honduras 🇭🇳
| Beneficiary(ies) | Project | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Francisco R. Nuñez | Honduras Artisan Market Supply Chain | Community | A pilot project helping local artisans sell their products internationally, while giving customers a way to validate that the craft items were made by Honduran artisans and with Honduran materials. |
| Shy panda | Shy panda | dApp | An Ethereum-based donation platform helping animal welfare organizations raise funds from donors around the world |
| Juan Mayen | Spanish content production | Community/Education | A series of educational articles related to Ethereum for the Spanish-speaking community |
| StablePay | StablePay Layer 2 SDK | Development Tool/Infrastructure | An open SDK to abstract the complexities of all Layer 2 integrations into a single Web3-like library that users can use and extend |
| MacaoTech | MacaoTech | Community/Education | Hosting local Ethereum study groups and educational workshops |
| Scrutinized | Scrutinized | dApp | A mobile voting app that helps individuals and organizations easily run secure, transparent, and fully auditable elections using smart contracts. |
| Oscar Fonseca | Decentralized Transparency Platform | dApp | A transparent and traceable financing platform allowing donors to track the use of funds and the progress of funded projects |
| Rodimiro Cerrato Espinal | Tester: A Generalized Network-Based Blockchain Protocol Testing Tool | Development Tool/Infrastructure | A simulation and testing tool that allows developers to quickly set up a contained, fast and close to real environment with all the required services pre-configured |
Colombia 🇨🇴
| Beneficiary(ies) | Project | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organizers of the Ethereum Bogotá, Caribe and Medellín meeting communities | Local Community Events | Community/Education | Continued growth and development of local Ethereum communities in Colombia |
| Nethereum | .NET Developer Onboarding to Ethereum | Community/Education | Created Spanish developer content to help .NET engineers integrate into the Ethereum ecosystem. |
| Diego Mazo | Discover Blockchain | Community/Education | Further development of Descrubiendo Blockchain, a Spanish-language educational video series supported by Devcon covering the basics of Ethereum. |
| TRUE | TRU Academic Certificates | Research | Mapping opportunities and challenges around the use case of issuing Colombian university degrees on Ethereum |
| Cristian Gil and Juan David Reyes Paez | State of the crypto ecosystem in Colombia: results from a local perspective | Research | A case study report examining real-world examples of how crypto is used today in Colombia, 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 | A use case analysis of an Ethereum-based Emissions Trading System (ETS), with the aim of helping Colombian governments and associated organizations better understand the use case. |
Looking to the future
Thank you to all the candidates, to the organizers who collaborated in these rounds, and especially to Cristian Espinoza Garner who last year was the main organizer of local grants from Honduras!
Local communities contribute to Ethereum in powerful ways, from onboarding developers to building tools around new use cases, producing documentation in a myriad of languages, and welcoming new builders and users on Ethereum. The state of the Ethereum community is strong, in large part due to these contributions. In 2021, we look forward to continuing to support what seems to be an inexhaustible source of energy, innovation and inspiration. The work has just started!
If you would like to tell us what you are working on, write to us at LocalGrants@ethereum.org.
