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 undertaking 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 an extended approach to go, and we’re right here to work with the group to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working exhausting at analysis & growth to help the complete ecosystem. Moreover, we hope that these grants will sign to the group what we predict are the lacking items within the ecosystem that want extra help. Mentioned in one other means, the Basis is right here to serve groups and people which might be working to stop a tragedy of the commons.

This yr, we are going to double down on working with the group 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 might be 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 could 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 shoppers. Usefulness is for enhancing the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cellular SDKs, documentation, Solidity/Vyper growth) 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 target safety.

We’re additionally starting to have interaction with the design group 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 wish to fund extra design research, rent, and join proficient designers with thrilling groups within the area.

Lastly, we wish to remind ourselves of how the Ethereum undertaking started: passionate open-source builders contributing to the undertaking on their spare time. In that spirit, we’ve begun a “hackternship” grant for group members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect undertaking.

Awardee Checklist

Listed below 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 consider it will present tight suggestions loops for influence to the ecosystem.

Wishlist for future grants

In future rounds of grants, we wish to see extra functions in these areas:

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

2. Usefulness
   
   1. UX design research to enhance personal 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. Sensible contract audits
   3. Tooling that stops weak code

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

Subsequent steps

That is an ongoing grant program, and we’d like to ask the remainder of the group to method 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!

Greatest,
Ethereum Basis Crew
3.7.18