Track 6 · Organisations, law and finance · Module 28

Ecosystem grants

How grant programmes work, how to apply, and how to report.

Lessons: 7
Reading: 54 min
Quiz: 15 questions
Pass mark: 80%

The case used in this module

The Brindlecove Labs case (made up)

Brindlecove Labs is a made-up company with a made-up token, BRDL. Its made-up finance lead, Maya, looks after its grant. Brindlecove wants to build the Thornmere Test Kit: a free, open-source kit that helps developers test smart contracts on the made-up Thornmere network.

It applies to the Builders Grant of the made-up Thornmere Foundation, which pays in its made-up token, TMRE. The grant is 240,000 TMRE, paid in three milestones:

Milestone 1 (month 3): design published and first code released. 25%, or 60,000 TMRE.
Milestone 2 (month 6): a working beta, tested by five outside teams. 35%, or 84,000 TMRE.
Milestone 3 (month 9): version 1.0, a user guide and a public final report. 40%, or 96,000 TMRE.

Thornmere's made-up rules: Brindlecove must pass identity checks on the company, which Thornmere calls KYB, before the first payment. Each payment is made only after a reviewer accepts the milestone, and is locked for 6 months. Brindlecove posts a progress update on Thornmere's forum every month. If a milestone is more than 60 days late without an agreed new date, Thornmere may cancel the payments still to come.

TMRE was $0.50 when the grant was agreed. The kit is also listed in Thornmere's small quadratic funding round. The lessons come back to Brindlecove at each step, and some quiz questions ask about it. Nothing here is a suggestion to apply for, accept, hold or sell anything.

Each module tells its own made-up Brindlecove story, so details can differ from one module to the next.

Key words

Ecosystem grant: Money or other support that a blockchain's foundation or DAO gives to people building things for its network.¹²
Public good: Something people can't be barred from using, where one person's use doesn't take away from another's. Open-source code is often seen this way.³
DAO: A collectively-owned organisation run by proposals and votes, whose treasury can't be spent without the group's approval.⁴
Request for proposals (RFP): A funder's description of a specific problem, with a set scope and application window, inviting teams to propose a solution.⁵
Wishlist: ESP's list of broad gaps in the ecosystem, inviting builders to propose their own ideas to fill them.⁵
Milestone: An agreed piece of work, with a deadline and a test of when it is done, that releases a slice of a grant once a reviewer accepts it.⁶
Retroactive funding: Funding paid for work that has already shown impact, rather than for a proposal for future work.⁷⁸
Quadratic funding: A way to share a matching pool: take the square root of each gift, add them up and square the total, so many small gifts count for more than one big one.⁹¹⁰
Matching pool: Money that sponsors put up for a quadratic funding round, shared among projects on top of what donors give.¹⁰¹¹
Bounty: A reward for one clearly defined task, paid when the work is accepted.¹²
KYC (know your customer): Identity checks a funder runs before paying. For a company, they can include proof of incorporation.¹³¹⁴
Lock-up: A rule that you may not sell tokens you received for a set time. Optimism's grant policies set one year for most Governance Fund grants.¹⁵
Vesting: Releasing tokens bit by bit over time. With a cliff, nothing is released before a set date.¹⁶
Clawback: Taking back grant funds or locked tokens when terms are broken or key milestones are missed.¹⁵
Sybil attack: One person posing as many. In quadratic funding it is used to win a bigger share of the matching pool.¹⁷¹⁸

Sources

Ecosystem Support Program: home page. Ethereum Foundation, Ecosystem Support Program (read 22 October 2026).
Arbitrum Grants. Arbitrum Foundation (read 22 October 2026).
What are Public Goods?. Gitcoin support knowledge base (read 22 October 2026).
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). ethereum.org (page last updated 26 June 2026).
Unveiling ESP's New Grants Program. Ethereum Foundation blog, Ecosystem Support Program Team, 3 November 2025.
Milestone-Based Funding. Gitcoin, mechanisms library (read 22 October 2026).
Retroactive Funding. Gitcoin, mechanisms library (read 22 October 2026).
Retroactive Public Goods Funding (archived copy). Optimism PBC blog on Medium, with Vitalik Buterin as guest author; read through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, 20 July 2021.
A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods (abstract page). Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl, arXiv:1809.06421, first posted 17 September 2018; revised 16 August 2020.
Quadratic Funding. Gitcoin, mechanisms library, 13 February 2026.
Gitcoin Grants Program. Gitcoin (read 22 October 2026).
Bounties. Gitcoin, mechanisms library (read 22 October 2026).
Gitcoin's KYC. Gitcoin support knowledge base, written for its 15th grants round, GR15 (read 22 October 2026).
[RFC] Arbitrum D.A.O. (Domain Allocator Offerings) Grant Program - Season 3. Arbitrum DAO governance forum (post last edited 15 July 2025), 19 November 2024.
Collective Grant Policies. Optimism Collective governance forum (post last edited 8 May 2025; read 22 October 2026), first posted 6 April 2023.
Finance: VestingWallet and VestingWalletCliff. OpenZeppelin Contracts 5.x documentation (read 22 October 2026).
A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods, section 5: budgeted matching funds, collusion and fraud. Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl, arXiv:1809.06421v2, 16 August 2020.
Sybil Resistance in Quadratic Funding: 2024 Approaches. Gitcoin research, by Kevin Owocki, 25 December 2024.