The commons known as. It needs a runway.
From time to time, within the blockchain world’s regular cycle of funding scares, a crew sustaining a broadly used open supply public good declares mayday. Libp2p is a core infrastructure stack that powers a number of Ethereum shoppers (amongst others) and a big a part of Web3 infrastructure. It was, not way back, one of many newest tasks to place out a name for help as monetary assets ran skinny.
Ethereum’s public items panorama (within the sense of “groups constructing and open-sourcing issues which are maximally helpful to our ecosystem”) has no scarcity of expertise: the ecosystem is filled with professionals doing work that’s deeply technical, broadly relied upon, and chronically under-incentivized. These are the tasks that quietly hold the ecosystem safe, dependable, and able to evolving.
In addition they are likely to share a vulnerability: whereas they’re robust at analysis and engineering, they typically lack the fundraising, operational, and enterprise capability wanted to stay future-proof.
The essential symptom is: everybody will depend on shared infrastructure, however nobody needs to threat ending up at a aggressive drawback by being the one to fund it. Advert-hoc funding is fragile, political, and cyclical. Reliability of funding flows is sort of as essential because the funding itself.
Undertaking Odin exists to shut that hole: it’s a structured assist program designed to assist a small set of strategic Ethereum Basis grantees construct credible pathways to sustainability over a two 12 months horizon, rising ecosystem resilience by decreasing long-term dependency on a single funding supply.
What Undertaking Odin is, and Why it Began
The core mechanic is easy: every crew will get an embedded strategic advisor who works alongside them on sustainability planning and execution.
As an alternative of a single workshop or occasional steerage, Odin is supposed to be hands-on, iterative, and grounded in supply. Over 12 months, individuals transfer from exploration and analysis to possibility mapping, then into validation and execution, with the express objective of strengthening their runway by figuring out and piloting income producing alternatives and making certain they’re applied successfully.
Odin started with a sample we saved seeing throughout the Ethereum ecosystem (and past): a few of the most crucial groups (these sustaining infrastructure, languages, tooling) had been in a perpetual state of fragility. This, after all, is no surprise: they ship actual worth however their capacity to plan past the subsequent grant cycle was constrained by uncertainty, a slim set of funding choices, and restricted bandwidth for “non-technical” capabilities like fundraising technique, stakeholder communications or organizational design.
In lots of circumstances, sustainability planning arrived too late. Groups understandably targeted on delivery and analysis whereas they’d runway, after which, close to the top of a grant, shortly refocused on securing the subsequent spherical of funding. This forces distracting pivots and will increase strain. Traditionally, assist on sustainability points has typically been casual and reactive: organizations soar in when a crew is already underneath strain, however that sample signifies that this begins when decisions are narrowest.
Odin inverts this dynamic by bringing in construction early, embedding assist to cut back volatility and treating sustainability as one thing groups design from day one somewhat than one thing they patch later. Whereas it borrows the accountability and cadence of accelerator-style assist, the objective shouldn’t be enterprise scale however long-term viability: serving to public good tasks develop into steady establishments that may hold delivery over a number of cycles with out fixed existential threat.
Points Recognized Amongst EF Grantees
The recurring downside is never technical excellence. As an alternative, the hole is often an absence of a transparent, viable plan to sustainable funding and the execution chops to realize it. Many groups function with a single dominant funding supply. With no technique, they can not survive market downturns, governance shifts, or adjustments in funding priorities.
Even when groups make a stab at diversifying, the panorama is tough to navigate, and severe groups typically battle to establish which sustainability route is definitely value committing to. There are various potential sources (basis grants, protocol/DAO grants, retroactive public items mechanisms, quadratic funding, sponsorships and industrial or hybrid fashions) however every comes with completely different incentives, timelines, and dangers. It’s straightforward to float into grants purposes somewhat than constructing a coherent long-term plan, and it’s exhausting to judge trade-offs (and even generate assured choices) with out structured steerage.
Operational maturity is one other widespread constraint. A crew will be wonderful at engineering and nonetheless battle with planning cadence, function readability, decision-making, stakeholder communications, the best authorized setup to supply providers and the “translation layer” that turns analysis and improvement into outputs that others can reliably undertake, combine, and even pay to assist.
What we do, How we do it, And What Outcomes we Anticipate
Odin’s pilot focuses on EF grantees who’ve obtained vital grants earlier than and whose long-term well being issues to the ecosystem. “Important” refers to a undertaking that instantly serves core person wants and materially helps Ethereum’s safety, resilience, and day-to-day usability. The choice logic shouldn’t be “who’s struggling” however somewhat “who was largely funded previously and prone to profit from structured sustainability assist”: particularly the place the crew’s major bottleneck is fundraising/BD/ops somewhat than technical capability.
The engagement takes place over the course of a year-long program and has 3 phases:
Analysis and map sensible funding and sustainability choices obtainable to the crew, grounding the work in an understanding of the undertaking’s present state, prior makes an attempt, ecosystem context, and targets, and clarifying the trade-offs concerned. This part shouldn’t be about forcing a single “appropriate” mannequin and extra about highlighting the vary of choices and an understanding of the tradeoffs with every funding channel, particularly round predictability and operational burden. Throughout this part, a number of assumptions are formulated concerning the funding mechanisms greatest aligned with the undertaking’s nature and targets.
Validating essentially the most promising paths groups are snug with. It often means starting exterior conversations early (with potential funders, delegates, accomplice organizations, or potential prospects the place acceptable), shaping messaging, and establishing a plan that’s concrete sufficient to execute. Defining a really perfect buyer profile turns into important right here, and leveraging our connections to verify there’s a relationship between the undertaking’s dependencies and its customers is the uttermost essential end result of this part.
Executing or enhancing the crew’s pipeline, constructing the supplies wanted for fundraising and partnerships, and, when related, serving to the crew construction and pursue contractable work or assist agreements with out derailing core public items output.
Success shouldn’t be measured by how polished a roadmap seems to be however by whether or not groups graduate with elevated organizational resilience offering a reputable path to decreased dependency on the EF. Concretely, this may appear like diversified funding sources, improved operational cadence, stronger exterior communication and, when it matches the undertaking, at the least one repeatable revenue-like stream similar to assist contracts or service agreements that meaningfully stabilizes month-to-month operations.
Equally essential is producing reusable instruments and tips: templates, playbooks and measurable success metrics that may be utilized to future cohorts so sustainability assist turns into extra systematic over time, not reinvented per crew.
Vyper and the Actuality of Funding choices: Treating Funding Diversification as a Danger Administration Method
The Vyper core crew (supported by grants because the language’s early improvement) has not too long ago established the Basis for Verified Software program because the institutional house for this work, and gracefully turned Odin’s first pilot participant. Their product serves as a helpful case examine because of the simply observable implications: they produce essential work with ecosystem-wide worth however long-term sustainability isn’t automated. Like many public items, Vyper can entice grants and neighborhood assist, but nonetheless face a considerably delicate working actuality if funding is unpredictable or overly concentrated.
Vyper is a Pythonic good contract language for EVM, conceived by Vitalik Buterin in 2016, that focuses on safety, simplicity, and readability, aiming to make contracts simpler to audit and fewer susceptible to widespread pitfalls whereas nonetheless producing gas-efficient EVM bytecode. In 9 years of steady improvement, 76 releases, 231 contributors and 5,100+ GitHub stars, it turned the canonical selection for high-stakes DeFi infrastructure. At its peak, Vyper secured over 27 billion USD in on-chain worth and it’s led by the crew now founding The Basis for Verified Software program.
Why do we would like the Basis for Verified Software program to succeed? Why is AI-assisted formal verification their north star, and why are they now constructing each analysis and industrial infrastructure round it? At a normal degree, language diversification is crucial for Ethereum resilience, and Vyper’s footprint makes that concrete. At the moment, 7,959 Vyper good contracts safe greater than 2.3 billion USD in complete worth locked (TVL) throughout main blockchains, with an all-time-high TVL secured reaching over 30.0bn USD. On the bottom, Vyper presents a transparent alternative to onboard the subsequent era of Ethereum good contract builders, for them to have an unprecedented degree of security and belief of their code, and for the institutional capital that calls for the next degree of safety ensures past these the normal audits can present. It’s designed from the bottom up for formal verification and represents the subsequent era of formal-verification-first languages: an strategy that prioritizes machine-checkable correctness as a first-class property of software program, not an afterthought. It is a chance for good contract builders to have an unprecedented degree of security and belief of their code.
With Vyper, we confirmed that completely different funding channels, notably these outlined as grants or donations, behave very in a different way underneath stress:
Retroactive funding will be highly effective, however it’s inherently unsure;
Quadratic funding can work, but it surely typically calls for repeated campaigning and will be delicate to matching-pool volatility and a spotlight cycles;
DAO and protocol grants will be substantial, however they introduce governance overhead and, in some circumstances, token volatility threat.
That is why Odin treats diversification as a threat administration device. Our program highlights revenue-generating and hybrid choices, not as a rejection of public items funding, however as a means so as to add predictability in funding flows. For a undertaking like Vyper, paid assist contracts, SLAs, coaching or consulting providers can coexist with grants and retroactive funding, offering steady baseline operations whereas public items mechanisms fund core improvement and long-term analysis.
Success in participating with Vyper means the main focus shifts from pursuing a single preferrred funding supply to establishing a resilient portfolio. This entails sustaining legitimacy and neighborhood assist by way of ecosystem-aligned public items mechanisms, whereas concurrently establishing one or two dependable funding streams to cowl a good portion of operational bills. Over time, as supply self-discipline strengthens and outputs develop into extra contractable, that trajectory begins to resemble the Frontier Analysis contractor sample: sustained frontier work funded by a mix of grants and contracts, grounded in actual stakeholder wants.
How Odin May Evolve into the FRC Imaginative and prescient
At the moment, Odin features like an accelerator for Ethereum-related public items. If it proves efficient, the longer-term objective is to maneuver past supporting particular person groups and towards a brand new institutional kind the ecosystem at the moment lacks: Frontier Analysis Contractors (FRCs). FRCs would fund superior technical work by way of a mixture of grants and contracts, fixing others’ engineering issues with robust supply self-discipline and buyer focus. They’re wanted as a result of current classes don’t match fast-growing tasks: (1) startups typically want product focus and might’t all the time justify contract-driven work to traders, and (2) bigger analysis organizations excel at coordinated, long-horizon efforts however battle to satisfy sharp, fast-moving, high-context wants in an ecosystem like Ethereum.
The Basis for Verified Software program by Vyper is not only an instance of this trajectory: it’s the first concrete case of what an FRC seems to be like in apply. It’s not a startup: there are not any traders requiring it to subordinate long-horizon verification analysis to product velocity or market timing, whereas a separate industrial entity can pursue these alternatives with out compromising the Basis’s analysis mandate. It’s not a big analysis organisation: it strikes shortly and might reply to sharp, fast-moving engineering wants that coordinated educational establishments are structurally unable to serve. It sits in precisely the hole the FRC mannequin is designed to fill.
The FRC mannequin fills this hole by offering a sturdy “supply engine” for frontier engineering and analysis. Undertaking Odin is a stepping stone: emphasizing clear outputs, alignment with ecosystem wants, operational rigor, and a steady funding portfolio. In that sense, Odin is not only a assist program: additionally it is a laboratory for understanding what it takes to create sturdy research-and-delivery establishments for public items. The widespread thread amongst FRC founders is not going to be the particular type of their technical imaginative and prescient however their capacity to maintain and finance progress by addressing actual buyer wants whereas pursuing these visions. A future submit will dive deeper into this imaginative and prescient.
Why This Issues
Ethereum’s resilience will depend on the resilience of its public items, particularly from groups doing work that’s foundational, technically tough, and never simply monetized. If such groups function underneath fixed funding fragility, the ecosystem pays the worth in slower iteration, greater threat, and institutional information loss. Undertaking Odin is an try to alter the default by treating sustainability as a design downside and tackle it early: with construction, accountability and hands-on assist.
This initiative, together with different tasks that the EF’s Funding Coordination crew is engaged on, goal to chart a transparent path for Ethereum’s public items ecosystem. If you wish to be taught extra about undertaking Odin, please contact us at funding-coordination@ethereum.org.
