The nonprofit that oversees the development of the Ethereum has officially unveiled two grant programs that will support research on how to increase the number of transactions that its blockchain can process.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin described how the network begins to reach 1 million transactions a day. According to him, scaling the network is "the most important technical challenge" that developers must work on before blockchain applications can be widely used.

As such, grant programs are launched to encourage developers to implement two solutions proposed for scaling: the sharding and layer-two protocols that would be built on top of the blockchain aujourd & # 39; hui.

Sharding is a process that only requires a few nodes on the blockchain to check a transaction, instead of having all the nodes do it. Currently, ether developers are finishing specifications for their sharding protocol, and are looking for teams to build implementations and run them on ethereum testnet.

Layer 2 protocols, on the other hand, take a different approach by removing transactions from the main blockchain ethereum. The network would allow transactions to come and go from the block chain to be processed, but would not be used to actually deal with the transactions.

According to the blog article, grants for each program will range from $ 50,000 to $ 1 million and are intended to cover development costs. For both solutions, successful teams will also have a role to play in implementing protocols on the ethericeum mainnet in a next phase.

In addition to the performance of the developers of the Ethereum, the foundation is looking for third parties to study scaling problems.

In his post, Buterin wrote:

"Independent teams of developers, companies, and academic and academic groups are welcome, we recognize that different types of candidates may require different formats and processes and we are ready to demonstrate flexibility to meet the individual needs of teams. "

Fractal image via Shutterstock

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