ENS Grants, Round 1: 180 ETH to Gitcoin Grants
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) project is pleased to announce a donation of 180 ETH to Gitcoin Grants, the largest quadratic funding system for blockchain public goods. This ETH will be dispersed to grantees that have ENS integrated over the course of the next few grants rounds.
You can see the donation on Etherscan here. The donation came from the ENS Multisig, a 4-of-7 multisig with Ethereum community members as key holders, and the ETH came from .ETH name registrations and renewals.
This is just the first step in ENS giving back to the community. We plan on giving at least $1.5m in grants over the next few months.
We were once grantees
ENS started as a side-project of Nick Johnson and a few others at the Ethereum Foundation in 2017. Given ENS’s initial success, Nick left the Ethereum Foundation in 2018 with a $1 million grant to found a new non-profit True Names LTD and hire a team to take ENS to the next level. Later in early 2020, the Ethereum Foundation gave True Names LTD another $500k grant.
Since 2018, True Names LTD has built an all-new Manager (which itself is currently undergoing a redesign), greatly expanded the capabilities of ENS names (reverse resolution, support for all cryptos for payments, IPFS hashes, text records, etc), enabled importation of DNS names (starting with .XYZ names and a few others, the rest coming soon), and greatly expanded ecosystem integrations (now at 211 integrations and growing fast).
Ready to give back
ENS switched to a cost scaled to time held spent-fee model for .ETH names in May 2019. This means that in the depths of the bear market ENS started amassing ETH. Given the recent increases in the price of ETH, ENS now has a large treasury that can fund development for many years to come. Gitcoin Grants is a great way to do this.
ENS is a public good, and the organization that manages it, True Names LTD, is a non-profit. It’s always been our plan that if funds raised from .ETH name registrations and renewals surpassed the needs of ENS development, we would give back to the Ethereum community.
This grant of 180 ETH to Gitcoin Grants is a first installment, just in time for Gitcoin Grants Round 10 which starts June 16th.
