TL;DR: The 🏰 BuidlGuidl can help speed up your onboarding into the Ethereum ecosystem, but we can only help get you started; we can’t fund you continuously…

📖 History

It all began with a starter kit called 🏗️ Scaffold-ETH and the goal of helping developers tinker with Ethereum. Along with the starter kit, we also deployed smart contracts that streamed ETH to contributors and new devs. This first version of the BuidlGuidl was created as a funding experiment to get signal about what we should build next.

The second version of BuidlGuidl really leaned in to streaming ETH to reward developers for building prototypes that enriched the Ethereum ecosystem. Builders could turn in what they were working on and withdraw ETH. It was a simple and powerful, trust-based system that led to a big wave of prototypes and forks of Scaffold-ETH. But also the formation of a wonderful community of contributors.

By the third version of BuidlGuidl we were streaming to over 50 developers around the world! A core group of intentional devs within the BuidlGuidl formed and shipped our flagship tools and curriculum: 🏗️ Scaffold-ETH 2 and 🏃‍♀️ SpeedRun Ethereum. Also, a secondary, less intentional group of prototypers formed and our hope was that this would create an explosion of products.

In 2023 we funded 150 people with a budget meant for about 10 full-time devs.

What we found is that version three did create lots of prototypes, but it seems like developers are stuck in a prototyping loop and not having enough impact.

Version 3.5 of BuidlGuidl consists of two major changes:

• cleaning up the UI and making it more approachable to all developers

• turning off prototype funding to focus on what is having the most impact

😮‍💨 Growing Pains

These streams helped hundreds of new devs get their footing in the Ethereum ecosystem. The system was designed to incentivize builders to create prototypes that enriched the developer ecosystem. We won the battle (building prototypes) but we lost the war (building products).

It is very hard to take a prototype and make a product that gets users and has impact. A developer within the BuidlGuidl can technically just keep creating prototypes and keep withdrawing from their stream. Even with coaching to get users and have impact, the incentives are not aligned to continue their journey of creating meaningful products.

We are going to make a big step to change this today.

🚀 Developer Journey

If you are a developer exploring opportunities and trying to learn as much as you can about Ethereum dev: check out the BuidlGuidl. We have Scaffold-ETH 2 and SpeedRun Ethereum along with a great community of shepherds. We can also give you a couple small grants to help validate your work. But we can’t sustain that for everyone.

In terms of orbital mechanics: you should use the gravity of the BuidlGuidl…

BUT! Don’t slow down. Your goal is not to get captured by our gravity:

Instead, as you are passing by, let us help you accelerate:

With our curriculum, mentorship, and small grants, we can help you accelerate into the Ethereum ecosystem:

There is a clear pipeline for developers as they pass by the BuidlGuidl. First, you take on SpeedRun Ethereum. Then, you join an onboarding batch where you learn how to contribute to open source and work with web3 tooling. Finally, we can support you with small grants but only temporarily. We want to get you in the habit of shipping and send you off to go build products on Ethereum.

⌛️ Shutting Down Streams

As of today, we just don’t have enough to continuously stream to developers anymore. While some of our cohort stream programs will continue, we are shutting down all “simple streams”. We will try to help developers previously on streams find their next step, but we feel that the current system has incentivized too much prototyping and not enough shipping real products.

While we can’t afford to fill streams anymore, they will always exist onchain. Anyone from the ecosystem can fund any streams at v3.BuidlGuidl.com. If you find a builder from this list that is having a lot of impact, fund them or even reach out! If you are a builder with a simple stream, tweet it out and see if you can get ecosystem support!

If you are having impact on BuidlGuidl directly and your stream was turned off today, please apply for a small grant at grants.BuidlGuidl.com!

There are so many other amazing ways you can contribute to the ecosystem. Many projects are open source, go to their github and start knocking out issues/PRs.

There are also a lot of open positions in the space. Go apply!!!

🏰 BuidlGuidl v3.5

BuidlGuidl 3.5 will be focused on educating the next wave of Ethereum developers at scale. We will create a system that nurtures learning and prototyping at first, but is temporary and meant to accelerate your journey.

BuidlGuidl will continue to onboard and educate as many developers as possible with SpeedRunEthereum.com, ScaffoldEth.io, and our batches/grants programs.

🔥 Kick on your afterburners today at BuidlGuidl.com!