Disclaimer: work for, but don't speak for, Digital Science. Am not involved in the grants. I'll try and add that as a boilerplate disclaimer on each comment, b

Disclaimer: work for, but don't speak for, Digital Science. Am not involved in the grants. I'll try and add that as a boilerplate disclaimer on each comment, but to be very clear I am not speaking for DS at all. While I like DS (otherwise I'd work elsewhere), I'm very sceptical of blockchain things. I think this would be more valid as a criticism if it was the only grant available. DS run, typically, two per year which have no requirements like this. $30k is not nothing but it's also not a huge funding round (nor is it intended to be), it's a kick to get some ideas off the ground To be honest, I'd be surprised if you went to them with "this is not a blockchain but it solves the exact same problems of distributed trustless consensus with x y z, but more efficiently" and got a bad response. Sure, there's a lot of hype, but there's also not really that much actually built using the tech. Sounds like a fairly reasonable thing to give a bit of money to people to actually build things.