As we embark on a brand new decade(!), the Ecosystem Help Program group needed to talk to a few of the latest progress, transition and studying across the program, and share particulars of our 2019 monetary allocations.
What’s ESP?
The Ecosystem Help Program (ESP) is the arm of the Ethereum Basis targeted on offering assist to groups all through the Ethereum ecosystem. This contains monetary and non-financial assist. ESP is an growth of the Grants program, which beforehand targeted totally on financial assist.
Bettering Our Processes
The 2019 Ethereum Foundation Spring Update first previewed a few of our plans for evolving from Grants to ESP. Since that transition, we’ve continued to award simple grants, and helped make connections to different potential sources of funding the place an EF grant was not a match. Now we have additionally facilitated recommendation from business consultants, neighborhood publicity, entry to cloud companies and different infrastructure, and extra.
Over the past 9 months we’ve integrated suggestions to refine our utility course of and made plenty of modifications, together with:
- A standardized course of for reviewing ESP purposes
- An expanded group of area consultants out there to assist with peer evaluation of purposes, or to advise candidates on their tasks
- Elevated give attention to offering candidates with 1:1 suggestions
- Labored extra carefully with accepted tasks to create clearer targets, roadmaps, and mutual expectations
Increasing Communications
With these stronger processes in place, we’re making an effort to extend visibility and to draw extra high-quality purposes. To that finish, we’re making some modifications to how we talk, from enhancing current channels to including some shiny new pages to the ESP website.
Some modifications are modest, however we hope that they’ll be useful in each conserving the neighborhood knowledgeable and higher getting ready potential candidates. On the entrance web page now you can observe the newest information about ESP and see which occasions we’ll be collaborating in, whether or not just about or in individual following the present and ongoing well being disaster.
We’ve added to our FAQ, improved our inquiry kinds, and most significantly debuted some new web page banners that we predict actually tie the room collectively 😎. Preserve an eye fixed out for much more additions within the coming months, and common updates to current content material!
We’ve additionally added a Wishlist to carry consideration to particular areas like safety, Eth2, and privateness, the place we’d prefer to see extra purposes. This listing is not a declaration of what is essential to the ecosystem, or perhaps a assertion of ESP’s priorities. Nevertheless, we hope the listing serves as inspiration for anybody trying to become involved! As at all times, we wish to strike a steadiness between demonstrating the vary of efforts that ESP helps whereas additionally embracing potential contributors working exterior of the particular areas we have outlined.
On the reporting entrance, we will probably be publishing common weblog posts to announce new grant recipients, however a grant is just the start. Shifting ahead, we’ll even be highlighting what supported groups go on to perform. On the brand new Featured Projects web page, we’ll highlight tasks which might be months or years into the work that was enabled by these grants. We’ll additionally use our weblog and increase our use of social media to have a good time grant recipients as they obtain milestones and make progress towards their targets.
Monetary Help in 2019
Whereas we labored to enhance the Ecosystem Help Program all through 2019, we continued to assist tasks throughout the ecosystem. Awarding grants is just one approach that we offer that assist. There are a lot of wonderful groups that aren’t EF grant recipients, both as a result of they’re already funded or as a result of their specific focus is simply not the correct match for EF funding. Nevertheless, we work to assist these very important contributors in no matter approach we will (for instance, as a bridge to new alternatives or as an amplifier of community results for his or her tasks).
That stated, monetary assist continues to be a serious a part of how we assist the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Over 70 tasks obtained monetary assist in 2019. What’s listed under particulars newly distributed grants to groups in 2019. It doesn’t embrace recurring assist, tranches for newly achieved milestones from prior recipients, or funding for different EF groups. For extra particulars on the entire Basis’s work, we’ll share a 2020 Spring Replace within the coming days.
We’re together with names and summaries for every funded undertaking under. You will discover a searchable spreadsheet together with hyperlinks to study extra about particular person tasks right here.
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 growth is in full swing, with many groups working collectively to make Ethereum extra scalable, resilient, safe, and naturally introduce Proof of Stake! We’ve helped to fund a various bunch of two.0 shoppers, in addition to efforts towards interoperability, enhancing reliability and creating developer tooling. Along with the grants listed under, Ethereum 2.0 work has been supported by recurring funding and different channels.
Eth2 Shoppers: $1,695,000
| Grant | Description | Extra Data |
|---|---|---|
| Concord Consumer | Help for the Concord group to develop a beacon chain consumer in Java. | https://github.com/harmony-dev/beacon-chain-java |
| Lighthouse | Help for Sigma Prime’s continued growth of the Lighthouse staking consumer, written in Rust, for the Ethereum 2.0 community. | https://lighthouse.sigmaprime.io/ |
| Nimbus | Help for Standing’s continued growth of the Nimbus consumer for Ethereum 2.0, designed to carry out nicely on embedded techniques and private cell gadgets, together with older smartphones with resource-restricted {hardware}. | https://nimbus.team/ |
| Prysm Consumer | Help for Prysmatic Labs’s continued growth of the Prysm staking consumer for the Ethereum 2.0 community written in Go. | https://prylabs.net/ |
Eth2 Tooling & Different: $1,459,000
| Grant | Description | Extra Data |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorial analysis on CBC Casper | Analysis by Ryuya Nakamura of College of Tokyo and Dominik Harz of Imperial School London to determine the theoretical basis of CBC Casper together with the evaluation of safety, efficiency, and incentives. | https://ethresear.ch/u/nrryuya/activity/topics https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/415.pdf https://github.com/LayerXcom/cbc-casper-proof |
| Beacon Fuzz | Differential fuzzer for Section 0 of Eth2. | https://github.com/sigp/beacon-fuzz/ |
| Cryptonext | Survey and report on attainable approaches to aggregatable post-quantum signatures in Eth2. | https://cryptonext-security.com/ |
| Dmitry Khovratovich | Cryptoanalysis of the Lengendre PRF and Proof of Custody development. | https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/862.pdf |
| Herumi | Deliver the Herumi BLS library according to the IEFT spec. | https://github.com/herumi/mcl |
| Lodestar | Work by Chainsafe on Eth2 light-client R&D inside their Lodestar javascript consumer; in addition to persevering with to offer assist to the Eth2 JS/web-browser ecosystem by growing libraries, tooling, and academic assets. | http://github.com/ChainSafe/Lodestar |
| Nimbus | Grant to Standing, co-funded with Protocol Labs, to construct nim-libp2p, a networking stack in Nim. | https://github.com/status-im/nim-libp2p |
| Runtime Verification | Formal verification of the Eth2 Deposit Contract; constructing the Section 0 Beacon Chain spec in Ok Framework for the needs of formal verification; and formally verifying Accountable Security and Believable Liveness in opposition to the Ok Beacon Chain. | |
| VDF analysis—hybrid prover | Analysis on the soundness and efficiency of a hybrid Wesolowski-Pietrzak VDF prover. | |
| VDF: Quantity Idea Assertion | Show a quantity theoretic assertion which suggests an data theoretic decrease sure for modular squaring. | |
| Whiteblock | Ethereum 2.0 community testing and testnet/interoperability assist: evaluation of the libp2p gossipsub implementation, working with implementors to assist refine the networking stack and specification, and advancing interoperability efforts. | https://whiteblock.io/ |
Eth 1.x: $487,000
Very important work continues on enhancing Ethereum because it exists immediately, with upgrades being labored on by 1.x contributors to assist enhance Ethereum within the rapid time period. Centered upon areas embrace Stateless Ethereum, enhancing developer expertise, rising node consumer variety, making certain that working a full node stays sustainable, and getting ready a path to the two.0 rollout. As with Eth2, these are simply the allocations that took the type of grants. We’ll share extra about different supported efforts – together with Geth, further 1.x and Stateless analysis, and extra in later organizational updates.
Layer 2: $1,211,000
Layer 2 options allow all kinds of purposes which may in any other case be too costly, sluggish, sophisticated, or simply not attainable to implement instantly on the Ethereum base layer. 2019 was an thrilling yr throughout which groups and people throughout the neighborhood got here collectively to make big strides towards making Ethereum extra helpful and scalable. This work is essential within the close to time period, however simply as helpful for the longer term. Eth 2.0 will nonetheless profit from the improved privateness, scalability, and suppleness provided by Layer 2.
| Grant | Description | Extra Data |
|---|---|---|
| Connext | Aligning Connext cost hubs with generalized State Channel unification undertaking. | https://github.com/ConnextProject/indra, https://connext.network |
| Cryptoeconomics Labs | Plasma Chamber, an OVM-inspired, basic objective layer 2 utility framework | https://www.cryptoeconomicslab.com/ |
| LeapDAO | Plasma Leap: a Extra Viable Plasma design which permits execution of good contract performance on plasma utilizing EVM enforcer, a computation verification engine that permits for enforcement of off-chain execution. | https://leapdao.org/ |
| Matter Labs | Productionizing Plasma Ignis, a SNARK-driven zk-rollup implementation. | https://matter-labs.io/ |
| PISA Analysis | Common accountable watchtower system for state channels and decentralized finance protocols, which permits events to rent an accountable service to look at the off-chain protocols and on-chain contracts on their behalf. | https://www.pisa.watch/ |
| Plasma Group | Analysis into generalized plasma, Optimistic Rollup, and OVM (Optimistic Digital Machine). | https://plasma.group/ |
| Twitch Performs Pokemon on Plasma | Take a look at suite for tutorial establishments and researchers to check financial and coordination theories of decentralized governance fashions. | flexdapps.com |
| Unified State Channels | A joint grant to Prototypal, Magmo and L4 analysis aimed on the unification of State Channels efforts. Along with merging efforts already in progress, contributors labored collectively to rewrite, optimize and do formal modeling of the underlying protocol; design a demo app; and design a resilient consumer that gives fund restoration ensures to customers. | statechannels.org |
Cryptography and Zero Data Proofs: $426,000
There’s extra work than ever going into analysis and growth on cryptography and 0 data proofs. These efforts strengthen the basic constructing blocks of the protocol, opening up new potentialities for scaling, privateness, and safety. 2019 was all about sensible steps ahead, with instruments being constructed that make developments extra accessible to builders with out requiring a sophisticated understanding cryptography.
| Grant | Description | Extra Data |
|---|---|---|
| AirAssembly | Language for encoding Algebraic Intermediate Illustration (AIR), making STARK programming extra accessible by enabling succinct proofs of computational integrity in zk-STARKS. | https://ethresear.ch/t/airassembly-a-low-level-language-for-zk-starks/6419/4 |
| Aztec | Cryptographic development which permits nested composition of a batch of Aztec vary proofs inside a zk-SNARK circuit, to allow future growth of privateness preserving rollups. | https://www.aztecprotocol.com/ |
| Circom | A sturdy and scalable language for advanced arithmetic circuit design. | https://github.com/iden3/circom |
| FPGA Snark Prover | Bettering effectivity of zk-SNARK proof creation by offloading operations to an FPGA (area programmable knowledge array). | |
| Kestrel Institute | ACL2 Ethereum consumer and AXE equivalence checker to formally confirm cryptographic primitives (together with MiMC, PiMC, Edison hash, BLAKE2) relevant to numerous makes use of of zk-SNARKS. | https://www.kestrel.edu/home/projects/fv-of-r1cs/index.html |
| Legendre PRF Bounty | The Legendre PRF (pseudo-random operate) is required to allow secret-shared validators utilizing multi-party computations. These bounties encourage extra analysis on key restoration assaults, to extend confidence in utilizing this cryptographic primitive. | https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/862.pdf, https://legendreprf.org/bounties |
| MACI | Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure: a collusion resistance scheme that drastically will increase the chance concerned in shopping for or promoting votes. | https://github.com/barryWhiteHat/maci |
| Platon | Validation and implementation of the “Proof of Custody” scheme, which permits secret shared validators by way of multi-party computation, enabling trustless staking swimming pools in addition to redundancy to lower the chance of getting slashed resulting from compromised {hardware} or software program. | https://github.com/PlatONnetwork/proof_of_custody |
| Statebox | Analysis into utilizing class principle to show diagrams, securely and compositionally, into zk-SNARK circuits. | www.statebox.org |
Developer Expertise: $1,322,000
Ethereum opened up an entire new design house for purposes. As builders have explored this house, inevitably they’ve found new ache factors and required new instruments. We’re making important investments in enhancing developer expertise on Ethereum, from enhancing the vary of programming languages, software program libraries, dev tooling, node infrastructure, decentralized storage, messaging, and extra. These developments allow builders to do extra, extra simply, to allow them to give attention to their merchandise somewhat than on constructing their very own customized tooling. Finally we would like it to be simple – and enjoyable – to construct on Ethereum.
| Grant | Description | Extra Data |
|---|---|---|
| Buidler | Extending capabilities for Buidler, a job runner for Ethereum good contract builders. | https://buidler.dev/ |
| DeepSEA | Analysis at Yale and Columbia on DeepSEA, a language producing coq proofs to compile formally verified code to the EVM making certain no bugs are launched. | https://certik.org/deepsea_blockchain.html |
| Ethereum on ARM | Customized Linux photos to mechanically flip useful resource constrained gadgets into full Ethereum nodes. | https://github.com/diglos/pi-gen (for ARM32 repository, Raspberry Pi 4 picture), https://github.com/diglos/userpatches (for ARM64 repository, NanoPC-T4 and RockPro64 picture) |
| Moon | EVM and WASM runtimes for formality language in addition to associated libraries, documentation and tutorials. | https://github.com/moonad/, https://sunshinecybernetics.com/, https://github.com/moonad/Formality/blob/master/DOCUMENTATION.md |
| NomicLabs | Developer expertise analysis, prioritization, and roadmapping. | https://nomiclabs.io/ |
| Play | Decentralized database for verified Solidity code. | https://playproject.io/play-ed/ |
| py-libp2p | Capstone undertaking by 4 College of Pennsylvania seniors to develop a python implementation of libp2p, utilized by IPFS and Eth2, and accompanying easy-to-use toolsets | https://github.com/libp2p/py-libp2p |
| Shadowlands | Framework for constructing terminal-based Ethereum apps with a textual content UI, as a substitute for apps with web-based UI. | https://github.com/kayagoban/shadowlands |
| Solhint | Continued growth and added plugins for Solhint, a instrument for linting solidity code to establish unhealthy coding practices. | github: https://github.com/protofire/solhint/, Firm profile: https://protofire.io |
| Solidity Protection | Enhancements to the solidity-coverage instrument, which gives a approach for Solidity builders to measure the accuracy of their javascript take a look at suites, obtain protection reporting and extra. | https://github.com/sc-forks/solidity-coverage |
| SOLL | Second State’s LLVM primarily based compiler, a yul different to assist transition Solidity to eWASM. | https://github.com/second-state/SOLL, https://www.secondstate.io/ |
| Swarm | Analysis and growth on Swarm, a decentralized storage resolution. | https://swarm.ethereum.org/ |
| Tenderly | Enhancements to Buidler’s console.log performance. | https://tenderly.dev/ |
| Web3J | Improvement and upkeep of the Web3j library as a way to present an improved expertise for Java, Android and Kotlin builders. | https://blog.web3labs.com/web3j-ethereum-foundation-grant-update, https://www.web3labs.com/web3j, https://github.com/web3j/web3j |
Consumer Expertise: $213,000
We’re at all times looking out for common instruments and upgrades that scale back friction for the top person with out compromising decentralization or any of the opposite issues that make Ethereum particular. Addressing widespread ache factors like fuel prices, identification administration, tackle readability, and interoperability makes it simpler for dapp builders in all places to onboard customers.
| Grant | Description | Extra Data |
|---|---|---|
| Eauth | Oauth2 appropriate authentication service framework primarily based on Ethereum. | https://github.com/pelith/node-eauth-server |
| ENS Basis | Continuation funding for Ethereum Title Service, decentralized Web naming infrastructure on Ethereum. | https://ens.domains/ |
| Ethereum Pockets SDK | Abstraction layer which permits dapp builders to simply combine with a number of wallets. | https://dappsdk.io/ |
| Everest | Identification and credential system which permits identification claims resembling KYC standing to be securely printed, shared, and verified on Ethereum Mainnet. | https://everest.org |
| Gasoline Station Community | Meta transactions normal and decentralized community of relay nodes to deal with fuel charges on behalf of customers. | https://gasstation.network/ |
| POAP | Subsidization of Proof of Attendance Protocol fuel prices at Devcon. | http://www.poap.xyz |
Neighborhood and Training: $422,000
Merely put, Ethereum wouldn’t exist with out its neighborhood and the folks that work to develop and enrich our ecosystem. These groups carry folks collectively each in individual and on-line, enhance the variety of our international neighborhood, and assist to construct a common data base by making academic supplies free and out there to all.
Oblique Funding $484,000
A brand new sort of ecosystem wants new methods of interested by funding! The Ethereum ecosystem depends on open supply builders and unbiased thinkers to thrive. To this finish, we glance to assist novel methods of funding proficient contributors exterior the normal buildings of corporations and organizations; grants and VCs; contracts and salaries. This class is all about entrusting assets to the neighborhood.
| Grant | Description | Extra Data |
|---|---|---|
| Gitcoin | Funding for operations, bounties and CLR matching. | https://gitcoin.co/ |
| MolochDAO | Funding for the launch of MolochDAO in an effort to diversify growth funding. | https://molochdao.com/ |
| UNICEF | ETH and BTC donations to UNICEF’s Crypto-denomintated Fund to assist blockchain improvements within the growing world and encourage using cryptocurrencies (with out changing them into fiat). | https://www.unicef.org/ |
We’re happy with the whole lot our 2019 cohort achieved, and we’re forging forward in 2020 with renewed power and objective. As at all times, huge due to the neighborhood on your ardour and assist, and we sit up for conserving you updated with the newest from the ESP group! 🦄