The History of Ethereum Grant Funding, Built on Open Data

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Speaker: Rashmi V Abbigeri

Type: Lightning Talk

Expertise: No prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

Grant funding in Ethereum is ten years old and its record is scattered. Every program keeps its own database, its own format, and its own definitions, so the full picture has never been visible in one place. OpenGrants ingests grant data from Giveth, Gitcoin, Octant, Stellar Community Fund, Celo, and Optimism and more grant systems into one data lake. The records are standardized into one format, verifiable against their sources, and already consumed by other teams building grant tooling. The talk uses this data to tell the history of Ethereum grant funding: how allocation evolved from Foundation direct grants through quadratic funding, DAO treasury programs, and retroactive rounds to today's dependency-based mechanisms, what each era funded, what impact looks like across ecosystems, and where funding is heading next. Attendees leave knowing how each funding program performed and program operators leave with a concrete way to make their funding data legible.