Summary
The next allocation of the ENS Public Goods (PG) Working Group Strategic Grants programme is an initial 75,000 USDC grant to support a new and independent collective for Ethereum application infrastructure. Argot is home to a number of programming-language and developer-tooling projects that until recently were part of the Ethereum Foundation—most notably Solidity.
Because Argot is a collective (full details below), our funding commitment is set slightly higher than recent strategic grants. In addition, we’ve earmarked an additional 25,000 USDC, to be released based on the team’s progress over the coming months. We’ve adopted a tranche-based model given Argot’s newness, ensuring accountability while maximizing long-term impact.
In the process of spinning out of the Ethereum Foundation, Argot secured a meaningful initial funding agreement with the EF and now seeks to diversify funding sources to help guarantee the security and longevity of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Why This Funding Matters
The tools Argot maintains sit at the very core of Ethereum. For instance, Solidity underpins $250B+ in TVL—and when that much is at stake, it’s critical to uphold strong public-goods values. We believe Ethereum’s core infrastructure should remain independent from commercial capture, enabling collaboration over control. The software must remain rigorously open-source so anyone can inspect, use, and contribute.
Ensuring sustainable, plural funding for Argot reduces key-person and key-institution risk, supports long-term maintenance over short-term cycles, and helps keep the base layer for application development secure, transparent, and resilient.
Why ENS PG is Supporting Argot
All projects in the Argot collective share a common goal: making Ethereum application development safer and more rigorous.
“We are grateful to ENS DAO for this grant and for its broader role as a steward of open-source funding. For Argot, as a new collective, early ecosystem support is vital. We’re building the foundations others rely on, and contributions like this make it possible to do so sustainably for the long run.” — Argot team
What Argot offers across the stack:
- Languages:
Solidity (Ethereum’s primary programming language)
Fe (an experimental language with Rust-like syntax)
- DevTools:
Sourcify (smart-contract verification infrastructure)
ethdebug (an emerging debug-info standard for smart contracts)
- Formal Verification tools:
Act (specification and proof of correctness)
hevm (symbolic execution and testing framework)
In short: Argot builds across the stack to strengthen the ecosystem’s foundations, giving developers safer and more reliable tools. By uniting expertise in compilers, formal verification, and language design under one roof, Argot can take a holistic approach to development while leveraging a uniquely broad range of expertise.
A concrete example is Solidity’s ongoing work on Core Solidity: building a lean, stable core by moving hard-coded compiler functionality into a community-stewarded standard library. This enables faster turnaround on requested features without bloating the core language. Such a significant effort requires sustained funding and long-term planning to succeed.
Next Steps
By directing this strategic grant to Argot, we’re backing the independent maintainers of Solidity and complementary tooling—Sourcify, ethdebug, Act, and hevm—so Ethereum’s application layer can keep evolving on open terms. Diversified funding lowers single-sponsor risk and keeps the work aligned with users, auditors, and builders. This support helps drive initiatives like Core Solidity’s lean core and a community-stewarded standard library, while advancing verification and testing that make contracts easier to inspect and safer to deploy. In short, this allocation strengthens the ecosystem’s foundations with practical, measurable progress and invites the wider community to contribute, review, and benefit.
As always, we will coordinate with the Argot team on transparent milestones (e.g., Core Solidity progress, Sourcify enhancements, Act/hevm verification improvements) and share these updates with the community.
