The Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit organisation responsible for overseeing development of ethereum, announced two major grants on January 2nd. In an official blog post, Ethereum\'s creator, Vitalik Buterin, unveiled two substantial subsidy programmes, worth between $50,000 and $1m, to support urgently needed research on scaling. The post states that the blockchain network is approaching a million transactions a day, and that figuring out how to increase the number of transactions that can be processed is now a priority, in order to expand the use of its applications.

 The subsidy programmes are intended to enable a greater number of independent outfits \"to collaborate with the Ethereum Research team\'s base-layer scalability research and development efforts\", Buterin says, \"as well as building independent layer-2 projects that can tie into and improve the scalability of Ethereum.\" The grants are open to applicants from university and academic teams, as well as companies and developers, and Buterin hopes they will come up with a means to implement two scaling solutions to be built on top of the existing blockchain.

 \"Sharding\" is one way ethereum\'s developers have devised to reduce the number of nodes required to verify a transaction. Layer-Two protocols remove transactions from the main ethereum blockchain in order to process them, although they don\'t actually process them themselves. The subsidies are for the solutions\' development costs, but successful applicants will also be involved in implementing the new protocols.