Where the money came from, and what we did with it
Most grants pages are marketing. This one isn't.
We received one major grant. We shipped 6 open-source public goods with it. We pivoted once. We have 200+ public repos. Below is the complete, unedited record β including the parts that don't make us look good.
Inspired by the radical transparency of Horse Browser's public stats, Ethereum ESP allocations, and Optimism RetroPGF.
Why this page exists
You deserve to know the health of the projects you rely on.1 When we applied for our a16z grant in 2022, we had almost no public information about how other crypto projects actually spent their funding. Grant pages listed deliverables in glossy bullet points but never mentioned the pivot that happened three months in, or the testnet that only two people used, or the repository that got 363 commits but zero external contributors.
So we decided: when we have our own grants page, we will include all of it. The $500K we received and the 7.5% equity we gave up.2 The pivot from energy-only to cognitive infrastructure. The public goods that worked and the ones that are still finding their audience. The whole picture.
Timeline
Every event in Plurigrid's grant history, chronological
How We Measure Impact
Following Open Source Observer's methodology, we track impact through verifiable open-source metrics:
200+ public repos, commit history, contributor graphs. All verifiable on GitHub.
Upstream contributions to AlgebraicJulia, Catlab.jl, GeoACSets.jl. Measured by PRs merged.
Gay.jl, gay-mcp, ASI skills used across multiple projects. Measured by dependent repos and MCP integrations.
Open game implementations, formal verification artifacts (Dafny, Narya), published analyses.
Allocation Detail
Following Ethereum ESP's quarterly allocation format: every grant with category, recipient, and description.
| Date | Type | Title | Amount | Status | GF(3) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-07 | MILESTONE | WasmJuicer Ceremony Participation | β | completed | + +1 |
| 2022-12 | RECEIVED | a16z Crypto Startup School (CSS) | $500,000 | completed | + +1 |
| 2023-01 | MILESTONE | Testnet #0: Edith Clarke | β | completed | β 0 |
| 2023-02 | PUBLIC GOOD | Microworlds: Open Energy Simulation | β | completed | + +1 |
| 2023-Q2 | MILESTONE | The Pivot | β | completed | β 0 |
| 2023-2024 | PUBLIC GOOD | AlgebraicJulia Ecosystem Contributions | β | completed | β -1 |
| 2024-Q2 | PUBLIC GOOD | Gay.jl: Deterministic Color Infrastructure | β | completed | + +1 |
| 2024-2025 | PUBLIC GOOD | ASI: Topological Chemputer | β | in-progress | β 0 |
| 2025-Q1 | PUBLIC GOOD | Open Games & Mechanism Design Research | β | in-progress | β -1 |
| 2025-2026 | PUBLIC GOOD | Plurigrid Portal: Open Research Dashboard | β | in-progress | β 0 |
| 2026+ | PLANNED | Plurigrid Grants Program (Outbound) | β | planned | + +1 |
Footnotes
This was before we had any real idea what we were building. We knew it involved energy grids and cryptography. That was about it.
The equity component is unusual for a "grant." We include it here because transparency means not hiding the parts that make you look less indie. a16z invested $500K at 7.5% equity. That is the deal. Now you know.
Named after the first woman to earn an EE degree from MIT. We name testnets after scientists because naming things after people you admire is free and keeps you honest.
This was the hardest moment. We had built an energy trading testnet, had real solar panel data, had a working double auction β and then realized the category-theoretic tools we were using for energy coordination were general-purpose. The pivot felt like admitting the original pitch was wrong. It wasn't wrong. It was a special case.
We contribute to AlgebraicJulia because we actually use it, not because it looks good on a grant report. ACSets are how we think about data. Catlab is how we compose systems. The contributions are selfish in the best way.
The name "Gay.jl" was a deliberate choice. Deterministic color generation is inherently about identity β the same seed always produces the same color. The library asserts that identity should be reproducible, verifiable, and beautiful.
We are launching outbound grants because we received one, and it changed our trajectory. Someone has to go first. We think being on both sides of the table β having applied for and received grants β makes us better grant-makers.