• Zilliqa (ZIL) says its primary aim, for now, is to empower its devs and community members through grants
• Nine teams have been selected in this third wave of the Zilliqa ecosystem grants programme
• Zilliqa has also restructured its grant programme to promote its engagement with participants

Zilliqa (ZIL), a blockchain project created by a team of researchers focused on building a next-generation highly scalable distributed ledger technology platform, has announced the awardees for the third wave of its $5 million Zilliqa ecosystem grants.

Building a robust ecosystem

Per the official announcement, following a successful Mainnet launch in January 2019, Zilliqa is now focusing on empowering its developer community to enable them to build more functional solutions on the network.

“We believe that the strength of a blockchain protocol lies in the community that continues to both support and propel it forward,” the team stated, adding “our Ecosystem Grant programme serves as both a creative outlet for our community members as well as a way for us to support you in your endeavors of bringing innovative ideas to life.”

Created in 2018, the Ecosystem Grants programme is aimed at providing the financial support needed by developers to create highly functional dApps on the network.

An updated grants programme

In a bid to offer more clarity and guidance to participating teams, the team says it has updated the programme structure, adding three defined tracks: infrastructure, innovation, and research tracks.

Per the team, the Infrastructure track is for developers interested in creating open source tools, cryptocurrency mining tools, software development kit (SDK) and more.

In the same vein, the  innovation track is for entrepreneurs interested in creating dApps such as games, innovative protocols and more, on the Zilliqa blockchain.

Thirdly, the research track is exclusive to researchers looking to work with Zilliqa to find solutions to some of the pertinent issues plaguing the DLT and cryptospace, including scalability, consensus design and more.

The third wave of Zilliqa grants awardees

A total of nine blockchain dev teams have been selected to receive the grants. In no particular order, they include Moonlet, xZIL, ZILMiner, KOFO, LaksaRuby, and several others.

As reported by Blockchain Reporter on January 31, the successful Zilliqa mainnet launch made the project the first ever blockchain network and cryptocurrency to implement sharding.

At press time, ZIL sits at number 40 on the CoinMarketCap top 100 cryptos table with a price of $0.018 and a 24-hour trading volume of $11 million.