NEAR Foundation Awards Development Grant to Grain

$50,000 for NEAR Protocol compiler support, a NEAR SDK, feature bounties, and more.

Oscar Spencer
August 16, 2021

Prepare for Grain on NEAR

The NEAR Foundation has awarded a $50,000 grant to the Grain team to support the development of smart contracts on the NEAR blockchain using the Grain language. The NEAR Protocol is a permissionless, Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol that anyone can access. If you’d like to learn more about it, check out the NEAR website! This is excellent news for NEAR users who will have another language to choose from to develop their smart contracts, but also excellent news for the Grain community as a whole—nearly all of the work to be done to support development on NEAR are improvements to the Grain compiler, tooling, and standard library. You’ll see new compiler optimizations, tools to make writing and maintaining code easier, and new additions to the standard library to work with data types like JSON and high precision numbers. This is a huge step forward for Grain, and the team is honored and grateful for the support, especially as the NEAR Foundation has been fantastic throughout the process.

For the Community

Contributions are a huge part of what keeps the Grain train moving along, so $10,000 of the grant has been allocated to be used for bounties. These bounties will be set for community members to be rewarded for implementing features or fixing bugs. Stay tuned to our Discord server for more information on how you can get involved!

For NEAR Users

Be sure to keep an eye on our blog and follow the Grain Twitter account for updates! In the coming months, you can expect a full Grain NEAR SDK to make it easy to get started with Grain on NEAR.

We envision a future where you can not only write your smart contracts in Grain, but you can build frontends for your decentralized applications in Grain as well—yielding a complete, cohesive developer experience. With the NEAR Foundation’s support, we’re certain we’ll be able to make this a reality.


Thanks to the NEAR Foundation

We’d like to extend a special thank you to the NEAR Foundation for supporting our work! With your support, we’re able to move quickly on our goals and continue to advance the language. We’re thrilled to work with you and we’re stoked for everything to come!


Oscar Spencer
Grain co-creator & Grain core team

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