Announcing Beneficiaries of the Ethereum Foundation Grants

We’re excited to share the outcomes of the first wave of grants from the Ethereum Foundation.

As a reminder, the Ethereum undertaking seeks to assist helpful dapps and good contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the aim of the Ethereum Foundation 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 neighborhood to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gasoline the groups working exhausting at analysis & improvement to assist the total ecosystem. Moreover, we hope that these grants will sign to the neighborhood what we predict are the lacking items in the ecosystem that want extra assist. Stated in one other approach, the Foundation is right here to serve groups and people which might be working to forestall a tragedy of the commons.

This 12 months, 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 assist 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 may be in the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with present groups or by yourself. It may also be in the type of optimizing geth/parity or constructing alternate shoppers. 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 finish consumer. Safety can vary from auditing present 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 remedy 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 in 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 neighborhood members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect undertaking.

Awardee Checklist

Listed below are the inaugural Ethereum Foundation 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 examine

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

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

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

** #buidl Grant – Builds for the finish consumer (“useful” 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 these grants could also be adopted on with extra funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved. We imagine it will present tight suggestions loops for affect to the ecosystem.

Wishlist for future grants

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

1. Scalability
   
   1. Alternate sharding implementations
   2. Alternate plasma implementations
   3. Enhancing effectivity of present shoppers equivalent to geth & parity
   4. A tokenless “Lightning Network” 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 susceptible code

4. “Hackternships”
   
   1. You may have a job (or college)? No drawback! Recommend an issue you need to remedy and we’re comfortable 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 seeking 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 relaxation of the neighborhood to method us together with your concepts (application link).

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

Greatest,
Ethereum Foundation Workforce
3.7.18