devcon8 / funding the ethereum kernel what qualifies what it costs and what comes first
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Funding the Ethereum Kernel: What Qualifies, What It Costs, and What Comes First
Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN
Speaker: Martin Hansen
Type: Talk
Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2026
The Kernel is the set of functions whose failure would cost Ethereum its liveness, correctness, or accessibility. This talk moves from naming them to funding them.
It proposes explicit criteria for what qualifies. Some apply across the Kernel, such as being open source and free to use. Others depend on the category, since what makes a client worth funding is not what makes a research effort worth funding.
Criteria do not allocate on their own. They constrain and inform the decision, but making it well still takes expert judgement.
Qualifying is also not the same as being first in line. Functions are funded in order of dependency rather than as an even spread, so the framework can say where the next dollar should go, not only who is eligible.
Built on interviews with technical experts across the ecosystem, it closes on how the Kernel and its allocation mechanism should evolve, and where commercial models could reduce what neutral funding has to carry.