ICO beneficiaries like Omise Go, Cosmos, Golem, Maker, Raiden launch Ethereum Community Fund; sources say members pooled $100M, will provide $50K-$500K grants
The Pros & Cons of Ethereum & where to buy it. Molly Jane Zuckerman / Cointelegraph.com News : Vitalik Buterin To Advise New ‘Ethereum Community Fund’ Sponsoring ETH Infrastructure Tweets: @team_raiden : http://techcrunch.com/... - “In a first of its kind...a new fund that plans to pay out more than $100 million to promising projects in the Ethereum crypto space...the Ethereum Community Fund — will be supported by crypto projects Omise Go, Cosmos, Golem, Maker, and Raiden,” http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The five founding members are all products of the 2017 ICO wave: Omise Go raised $25M in its ICO on top of prior VC money, then became one of the first ERC20 tokens to cross a $1B market cap. That run-up left these projects sitting on large ether treasuries with no mechanism to deploy them back into the ecosystem that made them.
The fund answers that gap directly: members pooled a reported $100M to hand out $50K–$500K grants, with Vitalik Buterin advising. It arrives as ICO fundraising overall has been enormous but unregulated — 65 projects had already raised $522M by mid-2017 — so the question of whether token winners reinvest or extract has been open.
First-order effects
- Early-stage Ethereum infrastructure builders gain a new non-dilutive funding source sized between angel checks and seed rounds, with Buterin's advisory involvement as the draw.
- The five founders convert idle treasury tokens into ecosystem influence, deciding which projects get funded without selling into the market.
Second-order effects
- VC firms competing for Ethereum deals now face grant-funded rivals who can subsidize infrastructure at below-market cost, pressuring funds to offer more than capital.
- Other large-token projects face pressure to launch comparable treasuries or be seen as hoarding, turning ecosystem grant programs into a competitive norm.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Ethereum's development pipeline shifts from VC- and foundation-led toward self-funding by successful token projects — an ecosystem that finances its own commons, though governance of $100M in pooled member money raises accountability questions no coverage here yet answers.
The trend: Successful ICO projects are evolving from fundraising vehicles into ecosystem funders, recycling token treasuries into the infrastructure layer they depend on.