The Ethereum Foundation recently announced a shift in how it approaches public goods funding. Instead of operating in isolation, they’re moving toward strategic co-funding, with a dedicated team that coordinates support across multiple organizations. We believe this is the right approach, and the ENS Public Goods Working Group has restructured our grants to participate.
Why Coordinated Funding Makes Sense
For too long, public goods funding has happened in silos. Projects often apply to dozens of programs, resulting in duplicate funding, while other infrastructure remains unsupported. Teams spend months fundraising instead of building. Critical projects operate on three-month grant cycles with no long-term stability.
The EF’s new Funding Coordination team breaks this pattern by focusing on “co-funding vital public goods organizations” - bringing funders together to share evaluations, coordinate timing, and match contributions when multiple organizations agree that a project matters.
How ENS PG Is Participating
In our 2025 H1 Budget, we created a new Strategic Grants category with $160,000 USDC specifically for “significant projects in the broader Ethereum ecosystem.” These grants exceed $50,000 each and are designed for coordination with other funders like the Ethereum Foundation. This represents nearly half our H1 budget - a deliberate choice to support infrastructure that multiple organizations can get behind.
This strategic allocation works alongside our Builder Grants platform, which handles continuous funding for smaller projects (0.25 to 2 ETH) and our newly USDC funding flow for medium allocations. The separation enables us to operate at two speeds: making quick decisions for smaller grants and conducting coordinated evaluations for more substantial allocations.
We have already coordinated and deployed co-funding with the Ethereum Foundation Funding Coordination Team:
Vyper - $50,000 USDC with matching EF funds. Vyper powers $4.7 billion in DeFi protocols but has operated without stable institutional support. Coordinated funding changes that.
Remix Labs - $50,000 USDC as they transition from direct EF support to become an independent public goods organization. This ensures continuity for the IDE that onboards most new Ethereum developers.
Fabric - $50,000 USDC with ecosystem matching from 20+ teams working on based rollup standards. ENS’s own Namechain will be a based rollup, making this both strategic and aligned with our technical roadmap.
Decentralization Research Center (DRC) - $150,000 USDC with matching EF funds. The Decentralization Research Center (DRC) is the leading advocate for incentivizing and protecting decentralization in policy. This includes the development of blockchain protocols and applications that are immutable, censorship resistant, transparent, secure, and enable self-sovereignty. Their work directly benefits the infrastructure that ENS and the broader Ethereum ecosystem rely on.
The Path Forward
We believe this coordinated approach represents the future of public goods funding in Ethereum. Projects get stability. Funders avoid duplication. The ecosystem gets stronger infrastructure.
We’ll continue collaborating with the Ethereum Foundation’s Funding Coordination team in three key ways: evaluating projects together to align on infrastructure priorities, coordinating to maximize impact, and actively identifying gaps where projects need multi-party support.
We’re also excited to see other ecosystems beginning to adopt this model. When Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and other L2s coordinate their public goods funding with Ethereum’s core infrastructure needs, the entire ecosystem benefits. The more organizations participate in coordinated funding, the more stable and sustainable our public goods become.
The days of projects scrambling between grant rounds should be ending. By working together, we can provide the stable, multi-year support that public goods need to thrive.
Grant programs interested in coordinating funding efforts can reach out to the Public Goods Working Group directly.