ICO startups band together to create $100M+ grant fund for Ethereum projects

In a first of its kind, half a dozen ICO companies have come together to collaborate on a new fund that promises to pay out more than $100 million to promising projects in the ethereum crypto space.

The vehicle — called the ethereum Community Fund — will be supported by crypto projects Omise Go, Cosmos, Golem, Maker, and Raiden, with Japanese VC Global Brain also in tow. The door is open for other projects and companies to join and the fund size could increase independent of that, too.

These are visible members of the crypto space: among them, OMG’s coin market cap is $1.6 billion, Golem’s is $360 million, and Maker’s is $680 million, according to Coinmarketcap.com, while Raiden and Cosmos are highly-rated from a technical standpoint.

Beyond those projects, the Ethereum Foundation, which controls the Ether token that is the base for the majority of ICO projects, is involved with founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed in an advisory role alongside a number of other industry figures.

The exact scope of the project is not fully clear at this point, but TechCrunch understands that initially more than $100 million in fiat, Ether and other tokens has been pooled for the fund, which is known as ECF. The capital will be deployed via grants — i.e. not in exchange for equity or tokens — that will be awarded to projects, services or business that are seen to “enrich” the Ethereum community.

“This program will be established as a permanent financial endowment to support and aid projects in building crucial open-source Infrastructure, tooling, and applications,” reads the fund’s website.

In practical terms, the ‘Infrastructure Grant Program’ is likely to primarily focus on enabling valuable tech on the infrastructure side. For one thing, Ethereum needs to work on increasing its transaction capacity, as Buterin himself has long admitted and is working to improve. There’s also scope for grants to add value in other ways, perhaps with highly-rated technology or projects.