Are you a browser engineer interested in payments and building native support for Web Monetization into Chromium (Edge, Chrome, Brave, Samsung Internet), WebKit (Safari) or any other browser engine? If you’re excited by the challenge of building, experimenting and developing the components required to make Web Monetization a standard part of the web platform then we’d like to support you by making you a Grant for the Web Technical Scholar.
The Web Monetization standard has been implemented as a browser extension demonstrating the incredible possibilities of Web Monetization as a new revenue model for developers and creators on the web. But the long term goal for any Web standard is always native browser implementation. Requiring users to install an extension is a high barrier, and simply not possible for more than half of the Web’s users (i.e. on mobile devices). For Web Monetization to succeed in changing the business model of the web it needs to be accessible to every web user.
We kicked off a Technical Scholars program last year to fund talented independent browser engineers doing essential research and development to experiment and integrate Web Monetization into browsers in order to get closer to native browser support. Our first Technical Scholar, Sid Vishnoi, was a former Google Summer of Code intern. He was selected as a candidate by Mozilla who offered to oversee his work and mentor him as he explored adding Web Monetization into the Gecko based Firefox.
I’m proud of starting some thought-provoking discussions in the Web Monetization community, providing useful insights in many others, and helping reach consensus in a few long running debates. Implementing a browser feature end-to-end and seeing it work was one of the best experiences during my career. -- Sid Vishnoi, Grant for the Web Technical Scholar
But Sid’s work is just the beginning…
The Web is consumed through many browsers on many different devices and we’re now looking to fund new technical scholars ready to take the torch from Sid and run with it. We’ve had interest from major browsers in supporting this work and we’re now looking for the engineers and researchers capable of taking it on.
Are you interested in building Web Monetization into the web platform? If so, please complete this Browser Technical Scholar interest form. If approved, we'll work to match you with a host organization.