IOTA announces Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF)

As the IOTA team writes, it took several months to develop the legal framework and internal governance model for the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF). Now it is done. As reported by the IOTA team via Medium, the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF) is launching to establish the “promotion of a vibrant ecosystem of community development around the IOTA Protocol”.

The development team has completely redesigned the IOTA ecosystem platform to clarify the separation between the IOTA ecosystem platform and the IOTA EDF.

The IOTA Ecosystem aims to be the place where the community can share various projects, tutorials and events they work on, provide updates on their projects and connect with each other. In addition, a feature has been added to publish articles, blogs and scientific research. The ecosystem is therefore more aimed at hobby developers and IOTA supporters.

In contrast, the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund takes a more professional approach, but is also part of the IOTA Ecosystem. The EDF offers the opportunity to receive financial support if the project for the IOTA ecosystem has clear benefits for the whole community.

The separation has now been realized by creating two subdomains: ecosystem.iota.org and fund.iota.org.

In addition, the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund was established by the IOTA Foundation as a non-profit limited liability company (gGmbH) in order to transparently and clearly separate the donations to the EDF from the funds of the IOTA Foundation. While the IOTA Foundation is driving the development and adoption of the open source IOTA protocol, the EDF aims to help the IOTA community develop around the IOTA protocol.

In order to maximize the benefits, established criteria and an authorization procedure have been developed. There are basically three categories that are eligible for funding: projects, events and academic research fellowships.

Projects can be “anything from open source software and educational tools to new concepts and business ideas.” Once a month, the best projects in an internal EDF grant committee, currently consisting of David Sønstebø, Holger Köther and Lewis Freiberg, will be discussed and decided. The allocation of funding is then in IOTA tokens.

Events can be meetups, hackathons, and conferences that require funding to host the event. Academic research fellowships may include Master Student Scholarships, Doctoral Scholarships, Research Associates / Postgraduate Scholarships, and Professorship Scholarships.

The first scholarship has already been awarded to Martyn Janes, who will develop an EDF donation tracking system (US $ 12,000) to ensure full transparency to the IOTA community and record fixed-income financing arrangements at Tangle.