A Killer Ecosystem:

“Pundits attack our space with accusations that there have been no killer apps. I disagree. File sharing platforms could be considered the first killer app of the decentralization space. While piracy is a problem, these systems pioneered revolutionary approaches to distribution and disintermediation. The second killer app has to be cryptocurrencies themselves, with millions around the world benefitting from better ways of transferring or storing value, especially in developing nations.

The third killer app is the creation, issuance, distribution, exchange and management of so many different kinds of crypto assets. Projects are being funded and infrastructure for a next generation natively digital economy is being built to the tune of tens of billions of dollars that clear and settle on the Ethereum every day. But the pundits don’t notice because the benefits accrue in a decentralized fashion. Pundits are having trouble recognizing these killer applications, because they don’t reward existing intermediaries or pile stacks of value into new intermediaries. But many lives are improving.

In referring to the lamenting over lack of an obvious killer app, Vitalik said “the ‘killing’ will be death-by-[a]-thousand-cuts.” Decentralization is the killer organizing principle. It is ushering in the Web 3.0 world. Blockchains are the killer automated trust foundation promoting synergy and collaboration. And Ethereum is the killer ecosystem. An ecosystem that will transform global economic, social and political systems.

ConsenSys and Decentralized Organizations:

“We are in the early days of exploring what a decentralized company can be. But the vision emerging is one of many autonomous units each operating as though they are embedded in an efficient free market.

The ConsenSys Mesh is a hybrid organization in various ways: part software company, part professional services consultancy, part VC. And it is hybrid in that it maintains structures required to operate in the legacy world, especially in our Finance, HR and Legal groups, but it is also mapping out what might be possible with respect to operating in the decentralized future.

As we get better in articulating APIs and SLAs for our various functional groups, we can imagine that even Marketing, HR, Finance and Legal will be able to offer tools and services not just to our internal groups, but to other companies as well. As many of our groups externalize their offerings, and as we all evolve towards greater decentralization, soon it won’t be hard to imagine companies using our various services and effectively permissionlessly attaching themselves to the mesh.”

ConsenSys Grants:

“We are excited to announce the new ConsenSys Grants Program. Soon we will be unveiling a $500,000 USD fund that will be dispersed in amounts of $10,000 to $25,000. Successful projects in this round will be eligible for follow on grants. The grants program is an effort to encourage the growth of the Ethereum infrastructure layer with bounties and grants for open source projects.

Grant awards will focus on infrastructure, research, interoperability, usability and developer tools. We will cooperate with Gitcoin and the Bounties.Network for some of these dispersals. More information, including categories and application process, will be coming soon.”

A Commitment to Open Source:

“ConsenSys believes investing in the ecosystem is critical, perhaps now more than ever as this experiment that we have been privileged to be part of is moving towards usability by consumers and towards becoming globally systemically important.

We are also passionate about open source. Gitcoin and CodeFund enable open source developers to get compensated for their important work. Our Protocol and Systems Engineering Group, PegaSys, just released Pantheon, a new Java-based Ethereum client that is synched to and running on mainnet now. The code was open sourced on github a few days ago and released under the Apache 2 license.

We welcomed Jim Jagielski to the mesh several months ago. Jim is one of the original 8 Apache Group members. This evolved to him cofounding and directing The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and serving as a core developer on several ASF projects. At ConsenSys Jim is our open source guru, helping our projects with their open source strategy and mechanics.”