Thanks all for making use of, and we’re excited to announce the newest Ethereum Basis grants! We funded 22 recipients for a complete of $2.84M.
Apply here for the next round! 🦄
Background
The Ethereum venture seeks to help helpful dapps and good contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the objective of the Ethereum Basis is to empower builders with best-in-class R&D, developer expertise, and training. Regardless of the early promise of the ecosystem, we nonetheless have a protracted strategy to go, and we’re right here to work with the group to drive concrete progress.
These grants will gasoline the groups working laborious at analysis & growth to help your complete ecosystem and assist make Ethereum extra scalable, helpful and safe. These tasks haven’t any ICOs, no token gross sales, and focus merely on constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.
Scalability may be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with present groups or by yourself. It may also be within the type of optimizing geth/parity or constructing alternate purchasers. Usability is for enhancing the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cellular SDKs) or the person expertise. Safety can vary from auditing present contracts to offering instruments that forestall error-prone programming patterns to contributing to various second-layer languages that target safety. We’re additionally starting to interact with the product/design group to assist resolve product and UX design issues, together with areas like key administration, Ethereum funds UX and onboarding flows.
Lastly, we wish to remind ourselves of how the Ethereum venture started: passionate open-source builders contributing to the venture on their spare time. In that spirit, we’ve begun a “hackternship” grant for group members that suggest an impactful Ethereum facet venture.
What we offer for grantees
- Non-dilutive funding
- Technical advisory
- Connection to extra customers
- Platform to share your work
We hope to supply Ethereum groups with extra runway, recommendation and sources to focus merely on constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.
Additionally, many of those grants could also be adopted on with further funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved. We consider this may present tight suggestions loops for impression to the ecosystem.
Grantee Checklist: Could 2018
Scalability:
Perun – $250K. State channels R&D.
PISA (by Patrick McCorry et al.) – $250K. State channels R&D.
Sprites Implementation (by Enuma) – $200K. Cost channels implementation.
Basic Computation on Plasma (by Parsec Labs) – $50K. Plasma implementation.
Plasma (by Kyokan) – $50K. Plasma implementation.
Plasma (by Fourth State) – $32K. Plasma implementation.
Usability:
DevEx grants*:
WalletConnect (by Balance.io) – $150K. Interoperability for net dapps and cellular wallets.
iOS Dev Equipment (by Ackee) – $50K. iOS + Ethereum starter venture (MVVM help).
EtherKit (by vault.io) – $50K. iOS growth framework (Swift).
vipnode – $35K. Mild shopper incentivization.
BrowsEth – $25K. Typescript library for browsers.
#buidl grants**:
ENS Foundation – $1M. To this point, the Ethereum Basis has supported ENS by way of hiring builders internally, however now ENS is mature sufficient to turn out to be its personal unbiased group. We’re excited to proceed working with this nice venture/group going ahead.
Pop Wallet – $100K. Open-source browser pockets.
Trust Wallet – $30K. Open-source cellular pockets.
Safety:
Zeppelin – $430K. Solidity compiler audit (co-sponsored with Augur)
Cedille – $50K. Sensible contract formal verification R&D.
SecureEth – $30K. Sensible contract growth requirements.
Gitcoin – $25K. Bug bounty platform.
Hackternship:
Flint Programming Language – $10K. Security-focused good contract language.
Richard Littauer – $10K. Developer onboarding documentation.
Chris Spannos – $10K. Developer onboarding documentation.
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Yi Solar et al.) – $5K. Sharding R&D.
* DevEx Grant – Improves developer expertise (“helpful” for builders).
** #buidl Grant – Builds for the tip person (“helpful” for customers).
Wishlist for future grants
In future rounds of grants, we wish to see extra functions in these areas:
- Scalability
- Extra fee and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
- Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
- Extra sharding implementations 💚
- Enhancing effectivity of present purchasers similar to geth & parity 💚💙
- A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum 💙
- Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 🔥
- WebAssembly R&D 🔥
- Usability
- Enhance non-public key administration and transacting in Ethereum 💚💙
- Various pockets / shopper designs 💙
- Requirements and portability between wallets 💙🔥
- Tooling that improves developer expertise 💚💙
- Improved documentation & developer/person training movies 💚💙
- Tokenless finish person merchandise 🔥
- Vyper growth 🔥
- Extra safety centered high-level languages 🔥
- Safety
- Safety audits for Solidity and Vyper 💙
- Sensible contract audits 💚
- Particularly, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults 🔥
- Tooling that forestalls weak code 💚💙
- Hackternships
- You have already got a job (or faculty)? No drawback! Counsel an issue you need to resolve and we’re blissful to fund a 10-week $10K externship to your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. 💚💙(Profitable tasks might be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally trying to rent and fund from this pool of facet tasks. For those who’re on the lookout for the place to start out, have a look at the listing above.)
💚– Funded in March 2018 cohort
💙– Funded in Could 2018 cohort
🔥– New to wishlist
Subsequent steps
That is an ongoing grant program, and we’d like to ask the remainder of the group to strategy us together with your concepts (application link).
Ethereum is constructed by the group for the group, and we’re right here to help you. Thanks for constructing!
Finest,
Ethereum Basis Group
5.2.18
(Largely paraphrased from first post)