The Next Billion Fellowship (cohort #6)

A search for stories. Stories that inspire us to focus on the important things, that compel us to find balance and fairness in the way we go about solving our problems, and that encourage us to push deeper into the mysteries of human cooperation.

Fellows receive support from the Foundation to complete a small quest inside a big narrative. In return, fellows are asked to share their story with the extended web3 community, or with the world-at-large.

The Next Billion Fellowship

A Fellow is a leader committed to their own project that helps Ethereum become a tool of and for the next billion users. Their project could be a decentralized app, a piece of research, an organizational initiative, or something else entirely. There are no strict requirements for Next Billion Fellowship projects, save one: earnesty.

Whatever the project, whomever the Fellow, the program seeks to enable the flourishing of populations, communities, oru individuals under-represented in the Ethereum ecosystem today. The Fellowship is neither the beginning nor the end of a Fellow's journey, but it may provide the support needed to encourage more ambitious, long-term goals and mindset.

Time for coordination

In 100 years, there might be 10 billion human people living in the world. On the scale of billions, what is the right frame of time to live in?

Should we orient our purpose to the here and now, to immediate crises and the individual stories of elegant, pragmatic solutions? Or maybe we ought to look long, toward the narratives that change worlds, towards new mechanisms and ways of encoding the trust structures that sustain communities, societies, and civilizations.

The Ethereum Foundation exists to nurture and support a protocol designed to treat all humans equally; the next billion initiative at the Foundation is a frame of reference for long-term thinking about that protocol's relationship to humans and, by extension, humanity.

We think that operating at the scale of humans is the way to engage with the challenges and opportunities existing at the scale of humanity. Even a 10,000 year journey begins with a few ordinary steps. Through fellowships, scholarships, events, and other programs that create space for creative exchange and the assembly of new memes, we support the protocol for human coordination, and the communities that will keep it living for years to come.

Stories over narrative

Protocols like Ethereum are often explained in the context of big Narratives about human ingenuity, collaboration, and society. But it’s hard to imagine a future in those heroic terms.

It’s the small stories that provide perspective into the soul of that protocol, and allow us to see what human coordination might look like someday. Heroes don't need to move a mountain to share it; a stone is enough.

Earnest Exploration

Much good can come from the meeting of worlds. Different perspectives provide new insights; new contexts create different designs.

Small, open-world, "finite game" initiatives reflect Ethereum’s culture of mutual discovery, exchange, learning, and teaching. We do our best to support the creation of space for collaboration, experimentation, and play.

What is expected from a Next Billion Fellow?

Fellows must be independent, passionate, and deliberate. Six months is not enought time to accomplish anything huge, but it should be enough time to figure out how to tell a good story.