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 sensible contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the purpose 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 neighborhood to drive concrete progress.
These grants will gas the groups working exhausting 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 means, the Basis is right here to serve groups and people which can be working to forestall a tragedy of the commons.
This yr, we are going to 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 tasks which can be doing nice work throughout scalability, usefulness and safety. These tasks haven’t any ICOs, no token gross sales, and focus merely on constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.
Scalability may be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with current groups or by yourself. It may also be within 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 tip consumer. Safety can vary from auditing current contracts to offering instruments that forestall error-prone programming patterns to contributing to different second-layer languages that target 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 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 neighborhood members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect undertaking.
Awardee Record
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 different.
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 (“helpful” for builders).
** #buidl Grant – Builds for the tip consumer (“helpful” for customers).
What we offer for groups that win a grant
- 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 extra funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved. We imagine this can present tight suggestions loops for affect to the ecosystem.
Wishlist for future grants
In future rounds of grants, we wish to see extra functions in these areas:
- Scalability
- Alternate sharding implementations
- Alternate plasma implementations
- Bettering effectivity of current shoppers resembling geth & parity
- A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum
- Usefulness
- UX design research to enhance personal key administration and transacting in Ethereum
- Various pockets / consumer designs
- Tooling that improves developer expertise
- Improved documentation & developer/consumer training movies
- Safety
- Safety audits for Solidity and Vyper
- Good contract audits
- Tooling that forestalls susceptible code
- “Hackternships”
- You’ve got a job (or faculty)? No drawback! Recommend an issue you wish to clear up and we’re completely satisfied to fund a 10-week $10K externship on your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. Profitable tasks might be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally trying to rent and fund from this pool of aspect tasks.
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 Group
3.7.18