This is a great post. I have the same suspicion that funding wallets / node implementations through grants and donations is not likely to be sustainable or lead to bad outcomes / conflicts of interest.

I did some research into this and, although you can point to Linux as an example of worldwide success in this model, it relies on contributions from developers at humongous mega-corps like Google to keep it going.

I have no solution here btw. Just my 2 sats and thanks for the interesting post.