Announcing May 2018 Cohort of EF Grants

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 undertaking 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 schooling. Regardless of the early promise of the ecosystem, we nonetheless have an extended strategy to go, and we’re right here to work with the neighborhood to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working onerous at analysis & improvement to help all the ecosystem and assist make Ethereum extra scalable, helpful and safe. These tasks don’t have any ICOs, no token gross sales, and focus merely on constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.

Scalability will be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with current groups or by yourself. It will also be within the type of optimizing geth/parity or constructing alternate shoppers. Usability is for enhancing the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cell SDKs) or the consumer expertise. Safety can vary from auditing current contracts to offering instruments that forestall error-prone programming patterns to contributing to different second-layer languages that concentrate on safety. We’re additionally starting to interact with the product/design neighborhood 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 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.

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 it will present tight suggestions loops for impression to the ecosystem.

Grantee Listing: Might 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.

Normal 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 cell wallets.

iOS Dev Equipment (by Ackee) – $50K. iOS + Ethereum starter undertaking (MVVM help).

EtherKit (by vault.io) – $50K. iOS improvement framework (Swift).

vipnode – $35K. Mild consumer incentivization.

BrowsEth – $25K. Typescript library for browsers.

#buidl grants**:

ENS Foundation – $1M. Thus far, the Ethereum Basis has supported ENS by way of hiring builders internally, however now ENS is mature sufficient to grow to be its personal impartial group. We’re excited to proceed working with this nice undertaking/staff going ahead.

Pop Wallet – $100K. Open-source browser pockets.

Trust Wallet – $30K. Open-source cell pockets.

Safety:

Zeppelin – $430K. Solidity compiler audit (co-sponsored with Augur)

Cedille – $50K. Good contract formal verification R&D.

SecureEth – $30K. Good contract improvement 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 top consumer (“helpful” for customers).

Wishlist for future grants

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

Scalability
1. Extra cost and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
2. Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
3. Extra sharding implementations 💚
4. Enhancing effectivity of current shoppers corresponding to geth & parity 💚💙
5. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum 💙
6. Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 🔥
7. WebAssembly R&D 🔥
Usability
1. Enhance personal key administration and transacting in Ethereum 💚💙
2. Different pockets / consumer designs 💙
3. Requirements and portability between wallets 💙🔥
4. Tooling that improves developer expertise 💚💙
5. Improved documentation & developer/consumer schooling movies 💚💙
6. Tokenless finish consumer merchandise 🔥
7. Vyper improvement 🔥
8. Extra safety centered high-level languages 🔥
Safety
1. Safety audits for Solidity and Vyper 💙
2. Good contract audits 💚
3. Particularly, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults 🔥
4. Tooling that forestalls weak code 💚💙
Hackternships
1. You have already got a job (or faculty)? No drawback! Recommend an issue you need to resolve and we’re completely satisfied to fund a 10-week $10K externship to your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. 💚💙(Profitable tasks will likely be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally trying to rent and fund from this pool of aspect tasks. For those who’re in search of the place to begin, take a look at the checklist above.)