Gitcoin has launched another round of CLR-matching grants, and I thought it would be good to take a moment to talk about a special category of projects looking for funding, why they’re special, and (therefore) why you should support them if you are looking for a way to put your DAI towards a public good.

Putting it plainly: I’m shilling to support the alternative Ethereum client teams.

Diversity creates resilience

One thing that makes Ethereum great is that there is no ‘canonical’ implementation for client software. Geth and Parity, from the beginning, have secured and maintained consensus over the Ethereum blockchain, but there are other implementations, written by different teams, in different languages, that do the same important job.

These ‘alternative’ clients are crucial to the vision of Ethereum as a decentralized and secure blockchain protocol. But they’re not widely used, and they should be.

With the DAO-ification announcement (and uncertain future) of Parity, it has become more clear than ever that Ethereum needs fresh blood in the form of new implementations taking some of the burden that geth has (diligently) shouldered as the OG Ethereum client.

Writing and maintaining an Ethereum implementation is hard work. Really hard. As Ethereum grows and introduces new features through EIPs, the work gets harder. But it’s important hard work, and its work we all benefit from.

One dev*year of support

#onemilliondevs is a nice hashtag, but a hard number to imagine, and harder still to value.

I want to present a more modest perspective from which to consider the funding in gitcoin grants: The dev*year.

That is to to say, the amount of work that a single new (capable) developer can accomplish in a year as a full-time contributor.

Remember, this is a person*year of work fixing bugs, implementing EIPs, and improving the infrastructure that keeps entire economies running smoothly.

👇 Take a look at the grants below 👇

Imagine each of the teams intends to hire just one additional developer to do a year’s worth of tedious, brilliant work for the good of all Ethereum.

Does the amount of funding raised so far seem appropriate to that contribution? No? Then maybe consider kicking a little DAI in to push that number up!