Vitalik Buterin gave away $300,000 worth of New Year's gifts

Vitalik Buterin tried on a Santa Claus hat and has already begun handing out New Year's gifts. He already has $300,000 in his bag to support three startups working on creating the next version of the Ethereum network.

The Sigma Prime and ChainSafe projects are creating a client Ethereum 2.0 called Lighthouse, and Prysmatic Labs is working on Ethereum scalability issues. Interestingly, no one had to write long letters with New Year's wishes to receive the gift. It turned out that it was enough to publicly complain about the lack of finances. 

This was the result of a discussion on Twitter, where the main developers discussed the lack of funding and the impact of the situation on the pace of development of the network. Moreover, all projects previously received donations from the Ethereum Foundation. But all developers note the lack of grants to fully carry out the work and the great desire to turn every ETH into a new developer. In their opinion, in the context of the falling popularity of cryptocurrency, updating the network software is necessary as soon as possible, but underfunded projects cannot even hire the entire team full time. 

In response, all three startups operating in the Ethereum ecosystem received a gift of 1000 ETH and a wish from Buterin to focus as much as possible on their work and produce results as soon as possible. 

Buterin, who has recently emphasized on Twitter that he never “gives away ether” due to the large number of fake projects under his name on social networks, published links confirming these transactions from his famous wallet.