Vitalik Buterin Donates $300,000 to 3 Ethereum Startups: Prysmatic Labs, ChainSafe and Sigma Prime

Vitalik Buterin, widely known as the co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain and currently its main public face, has just donated around $300,000 USD in cryptos to three blockchain startups which are focused on the Ethereum technology. Each of the three chosen projects will receive 1,000 ETH, which is worth just over $100 USD a piece lately.

Prysmatic Labs, ChainSafe Systems and Sigma Prime were the three lucky companies chosen by the Ethereum creator. All of the three projects are working on Ethereum 2.0, which is how the new version of ETH that will come out in 2019 is being called.

This new version, Ethereum 2.0, is set to be the future of the Ethereum network and Vitalik Buterin is less directly linked to its creation than he was before, so it makes sense that he’s giving these companies money either as a way to show support or to carve out some influence in their decisions (which is less likely since he affirmed that he wants Ethereum to be more decentralized and he has affirmed that can only happen if he steps out a bit).

Sigma Prime is currently building a new client for Ethereum 2.0, Lighthouse. ChainSafe is doing the same, but with an yet unnamed client and Prysmatic Labs is creating scalability tools that will be used in the new version of the ETH network.

The Donations Actually Steemed From A Twitter Conversation

Why has Buterin given these people the money? To help them, of course, but the answer of how this all happened might surprise you. Preston Van Loon, the co-founder of Prysmatic Labs, has been complaining that on Twitter that it was hard to take the whole team full time to improve the company. You can see the discussion here.

Our biggest distraction @prylabs is that we are still working full time for other jobs. Even with recent grants, it’s hardly enough to take the whole team full time with significant pay cuts and it’s certainly not even for us to scale the team to where we need it.

— prestonvanloon.eth (@preston_vanloon) December 18, 2018

Buterin saw the discussion and then replied: “Just sent 1000 ETH. YOLO (You only live once)”. The second grant was awarded to Sigma Prime’s co-founder Paul Hauner. He affirmed that he could certainly turn 1,000 ETH in more developers and got the money. Finally, Mikerah Quintyne-Collins from ChainSafe, was the third person to get the money.

From these companies, only Sigma Prime and Prysmatic Labs had already received donations from the Ethereum Foundation before. Prysmatic Labs received half a billion USD in October and $100,000 USD in March, while Sigma Prime received a one-time grant of $150,000 USD.