This summer, we established a small experimental grants program for ZK and crypto ecosystem projects, using funds that we ourselves received from Dark Forest donations and grants over the past few months. Here are a few of the projects and community members which the Dark Forest core team awarded grants to:

Project Sophon: Project Sophon builds plugins and developer tools for Dark Forest as well as the broader Ethereum application development community. Their Dark Forest tooling includes the Remote Miner, Broadcast Marketplace, Plugin Dev Server, darkforest-local, Dark Forest explore-only client, the community-driven plugins showcase, and more. They also contribute to broader ecosystem tooling with projects like hardhat-circom, open-source contributions to snarkjs and TheGraph, and more.

Remote Snarker + DF Dev Guides: We gave a grant to @BinderDouglas to support creation and maintenance of a few key pieces of third-party infrastructure, including the Dark Forest developer guides and the Remote Snarker plugin + webserver.

Dark Forest Wiki: We gave a grant to @spencecoin to help support his work in building the Dark Forest community-run wiki, an educational resource for new players which documents commonly requested topics about Dark Forest and Ethereum dapps generally.

[REDACTED]: We gave a grant to support the development of [REDACTED]. We’re super excited for [REDACTED], a [REDACTED] which is projected to go live in [REDACTED] 😉

Player One: We’re supporting a proof-of-concept project to build a more decentralized and generic version of Dark Forest’s Twitter-to-Ethereum account mapping system that stores data on-chain.

ETH University / ETH Summer: ETH University is a student-run organization which runs virtual learning programs for undergraduates interested in Ethereum and crypto. We’re supporting ETH Summer with ETH grants, operational support, and mentorship from DF core devs.

Reboot: We gave a grant to Reboot - a community of writers, technologists, and thinkers exploring how new technologies can shape society for the better. Reboot community members write about a wide variety of STS topics, including recently several crypto subtopics such as creator patronage, DAOs, virtual economies, and more.

We’re super excited about these projects and we hope to plant the seeds for an open ZK- and crypto-native gaming ecosystem. Community support helps make possible both our work on the game, as well as these experimental grants.