Binance Pledges $100,000 Donation to Gitcoin Grants

In a statement made at Binance Summit: Blockchain Applied, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) announced our pledge to donate $100,000 to the next Gitcoin Grants Matching round to support up-and-coming Ethereum projects. 

Binance’s pledge of $100,000 will be specifically for Round 8 of Gitcoin’s Grant Matching Program, planned for December 2 to 18, 2020. Gitcoin Grants allow developers to get recurring monetary support for working on open source projects on Ethereum, and we are extending this support to build a more active blockchain developer ecosystem. 

What is Gitcoin?

Gitcoin is a developer-focused platform that supports open-source blockchain projects via crowdfunding and foundation grants. Its mission is to grow and sustain open source projects in Web3, and its programs have helped build and fund many of the projects you know and love in Ethereum and Web3 more broadly.

What is Web3?

The premise for Web3, also known as Web 3.0 or the decentralized web, is pretty simple. It’s basically taking a unique mix of innovations that the Bitcoin protocol introduced, such as trustless infrastructure, peer-to-peer connectivity, giving control to protocols rather than intermediaries, and building that trust and verifiability into the core layer of the web. 

With our grant, we help move Web3 forward.

What are the details of the donation?

Funding details for the $100,000 donation will be determined using an innovative funding mechanism called Quadratic Funding (QF), which was pioneered by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Glen Weyl of RadicalxChange. QF uses a matching algorithm to favor projects that have a large number of small contributors, which allows for a more decentralized way to support development. 

The themes of this fund matching round are App Tech, Infrastructure, and Community, and we will support all these themes. In addition, we'll be supporting the hackathon they're running alongside the funding round, which will be focused on public goods and Web3. 

What does this mean for BNB Smart Chain?

We think that working across different blockchains is important for the growth of BNB Smart Chain and the entire industry in general. There are different parties that are all pushing towards decentralization, and that’s one of the reasons why we made BNB Smart Chain compatible with Ethereum. This interoperability allows developers to easily port over their Ethereum-based projects. It’s a feature that was requested by many developers within our community. 

It is important to point out that while BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum are two separate blockchains, they are not necessarily competitors. In this blockchain ecosystem, we are competing for talented developers and entrepreneurs amid several technologies such as AI, self-driving cars, big data, and more. As a blockchain industry, we need to work together and innovate and find more use cases for the blockchain ecosystem at large.

In a way, our support for Gitcoin complements the $100 million accelerator fund we have for BNB Smart Chain. Since that fund was launched we’ve given out grants to 11 projects, increasing the total number of projects on BNB Smart Chain to over 40. We continue to seek more projects to support.