The Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit worldwide team of developers dedicated to building and growing the Ethereum ecosystem. Over the past few weeks, the Ethereum Foundation has come out revealing its plans for how it’s going to support Ethereum throughout the next year.
Surprisingly enough, one of the largest changes they mention is an attitude change. Rather than having an addition mindset, the Foundation is moving towards a subtraction mindset. In the announcement. the Foundation went on to say “The Ethereum Foundation succeeds if Ethereum succeeds, and Ethereum succeeds with a strong decentralized community. That understanding governs how we work.”
For the upcoming development year, the foundation has pledged over $30 million to the development of the most promising parts of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Of the $30 million, $19 million is going towards the Ethereum of the future, Ethereum 2.0. These are projects such as State Channels/Plasma, eWASM (Ethereum Web Assembly), upgrades to smart contract languages and more.
Ethereum Plasma is an upgrade proposed by Vitalik Buterin and is meant to create a framework of sidechains on Ethereum. These sidechains will be able to process transactions and other dAPP related activities without straining the main settlement layer. This is somewhat similar to what Bitcoin is doing with the lightning network.
eWASM is Ethereum’s take on web assembly, and assists in the bridging of different coding languages. With a proper eWASM implementation, faster Ethereum smart contracts can be developed in C++, C, Rust, and more.
A smaller portion (around $8 million) is going to the Ethereum of today: Ethereum 1.0. These are projects in the current Ethereum ecosystem such as Geth, Solidity, Web3.js, Ethers.js, and more.
Lastly, the leftover $3 million is being dedicated to developer growth via Developer Education/Onboarding, community events, developer outreach, and more. Having a large pool of developer talent is key to any projects success.
Conclusion
Over the last 12 months, Ethereum has come a long way. At the start of the year, we saw the Byzantine upgrade, which focused on privacy enhancements on the network. A few months ago, we saw the Constantinople update, that brought PoS/PoW updates and changes to Ethereum’s inflation schedule.
This next year should be just as exciting, especially with the prices of all cryptocurrencies picking up. Which Ethereum update are you most excited for? Let us know in the comments!
