Vitalik Buterin Gives Away $300k to Three Ethereum Startups

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, donated $300,000 in crypto to three blockchain startups. The three projects receiving the 1,000 ETH grants are Prysmatic Labs, ChainSafe Systems and Sigma Prime.

Although there has been a lot of excitement surrounding Ethereum 2.0 and its eventual launch, the development of supporting applications for the platform has been moving slowly. In a Twitter thread addressing this issue, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator, noticed some of the developers citing a lack of funding as the primary motive for the stunted progress.

The decision was taken as a response to a Twitter post in which the Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon mentions that the team behind Prysmatic Labs cannot scale the team to where they need. Buterin just sent $100k to this project and two others.

Buterin Donates $300k to Crypto Projects

Vitalik Buterin source: Ethereum World News

So when Preston Van Loon, a developer with Prysmatic Labs — a firm working on Ethereum scaling solutions — mentioned that his team was “still working full time for other jobs” and that a full-time role would require “significant pay cuts,” Buterin immediately sent 1000 ETH (around $100,000) to Van Loon. This is, after all one of the advantages of digital currency: you can send it instantly and with almost no friction.

Next on Buterin’s Christmas list was Quintyne-Collins, who tweeted that $100,000 would motivate her to “quite literally drop out” of the University of Toronto, where she studies Math and Statistics and works on Ethereum’s Serenity protocol as a side-gig. Shortly after Buterin sent her 1,000 ETH, she changed her Twitter profile to read, in part: “Dropping out of @UofT to save Crypto.”

The next beneficiary was Paul Hauner, of Sigma Prime — a firm developing an Ethereum 2.0 client called Lighthouse.

Buterin, who (now perhaps ironically) describes himself on Twitter as a “Non-giver of Ether” in response to the many crypto scammers on the social media platform, also provided three transaction links confirming the transactions, which come from his known ether address.

Prysmatic Labs and Sigma Prime have previously received donations from Ethereum Foundation. Prysmatic Labs was granted $500,000 in October and $100,000 in March, and Sigma Prime got $150,000 in October.