Announcing Beneficiaries of the Ethereum Foundation Grants

We’re excited to share the outcomes of the primary wave of grants from the Ethereum Basis.

As a reminder, the Ethereum venture seeks to help helpful dapps and good contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the aim 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 option to go, and we’re right here to work with the neighborhood to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working laborious at analysis & improvement to help the whole ecosystem. Moreover, we hope that these grants will sign to the neighborhood what we predict are the lacking items within the ecosystem that want extra help. Stated in one other approach, the Basis is right here to serve groups and people which are working to forestall a tragedy of the commons.

This yr, we’ll double down on working with the neighborhood to make Ethereum scalable, helpful and safe. As such, though this grant program was introduced two months in the past as a strictly scalability-focused program, we determined to broaden the help to initiatives which are doing nice work throughout scalability, usefulness and safety. These initiatives don’t have any ICOs, no token gross sales, and focus merely on constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.

Scalability might be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with current groups or by yourself. It can be within the type of optimizing geth/parity or constructing alternate purchasers. Usefulness is for bettering the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cellular SDKs, documentation, Solidity/Vyper improvement) or experimenting with new dapps that present utility to the top consumer. Safety can vary from auditing current contracts to offering instruments that forestall error-prone programming patterns to contributing to various second-layer languages that concentrate on safety.

We’re additionally starting to have interaction with the design neighborhood to assist clear up product and UX design issues. For instance, key administration, Ethereum funds UX and onboarding flows are all areas that want main enchancment for mainstream adoption. We want to fund extra design research, rent, and join proficient designers with thrilling groups within the house.

Lastly, we want 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 neighborhood members that suggest an impactful Ethereum facet venture.

Awardee Record

Listed here are the inaugural Ethereum Basis grant winners:

L4 Research – Scalability Grant – $1.5M. State channels analysis.

Runtime Verification – Safety Grant – $500K. Casper contract formal verification.

ETHGlobal – DevEx Grant* – $200K. World-class developer conferences for Ethereum

Prysmatic Labs – Scalability Grant – $100K. Sharding implementation.

DDA – #buidl Grant** – $100K. Tokenless decentralized derivatives community + state channels R&D

Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Scalability Grant – $50K. Sharding simulation.

Plasma Taiwan Dev – Scalability Grant – $25K. Plasma implementation.

Ethers.js – DevEx Grant – $25K. Web3.js various.

Turbo Geth – Scalability Grant – $25K. Geth optimization.

Solium – DevEx Grant – $10K. Solidity static analyzer.

Alex Komarov – Design Grant – $10K. Key administration UX research

(Nameless) – Hackternship – $10K. Deterministic WebAssembly.

Ankit Raj – Hackternship – $10K. Technical writing for Geth and Solidity.

* DevEx Grant – Improves developer expertise (“helpful” for builders).

** #buidl Grant – Builds for the top consumer (“helpful” for customers).

What we offer for groups that win a grant

1. Non-dilutive funding
2. Technical advisory
3. Connection to extra customers
4. Platform to share your work

We hope to offer 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 imagine it will present tight suggestions loops for impression to the ecosystem.

Wishlist for future grants

In future rounds of grants, we want to see extra purposes in these areas:

1. Scalability
   
   1. Alternate sharding implementations
   2. Alternate plasma implementations
   3. Enhancing effectivity of current purchasers reminiscent of geth & parity
   4. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum

2. Usefulness
   
   1. UX design research to enhance non-public key administration and transacting in Ethereum
   2. Different pockets / consumer designs
   3. Tooling that improves developer expertise
   4. Improved documentation & developer/consumer training movies

3. Safety
   
   1. Safety audits for Solidity and Vyper
   2. Good contract audits
   3. Tooling that stops weak code

4. “Hackternships”
   
   1. You could have a job (or college)? No downside! Recommend an issue you wish to clear up and we’re blissful to fund a 10-week $10K externship to your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. Profitable initiatives might be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally trying to rent and fund from this pool of facet initiatives.

Subsequent steps

That is an ongoing grant program, and we’d like to ask the remainder of the neighborhood to strategy us along with your concepts (application link).

Ethereum is constructed by the neighborhood for the neighborhood, and we’re right here to help you. Thanks for constructing!

Finest,
Ethereum Basis Crew
3.7.18