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 challenge seeks to help helpful dapps and sensible 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 training. 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 gasoline the groups working onerous at analysis & improvement to help your complete ecosystem and assist make Ethereum extra scalable, helpful and safe. These tasks haven’t 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 bettering the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cellular SDKs) or the person expertise. Safety can vary from auditing current contracts to offering instruments that stop error-prone programming patterns to contributing to different second-layer languages that target safety. We’re additionally starting to have interaction with the product/design neighborhood to assist remedy 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 challenge started: passionate open-source builders contributing to the challenge on their spare time. In that spirit, we’ve begun a “hackternship” grant for neighborhood members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect challenge.

What we offer for grantees

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 assets 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 consider this may present tight suggestions loops for influence to the ecosystem.

Grantee Checklist: 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.

Basic 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 internet dapps and cellular wallets.

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

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

vipnode – $35K. Gentle consumer incentivization. </span><a href=”https://medium.com/buyethdomains/introducing-browseth-a-new-library-for-interacting-with-ethereum-795d18e7b87d”><span model=”font-weight: 400;”>BrowsEth</span></a><span model=”font-weight: 400;”> –$

#buidl grants**:

ENS Foundation – $1M. Up to now, the Ethereum Basis has supported ENS through hiring builders internally, however now ENS is mature sufficient to turn out to be its personal unbiased group. We’re excited to proceed working with this nice challenge/workforce going ahead.

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

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

Safety:

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

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

SecureEth – $30K. Sensible contract improvement requirements.

Gitcoin – $25K. Bug bounty platform.

Hackternship:

Flint Programming Language – $10K. Security-focused sensible 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 person (“helpful” for customers).

Wishlist for future grants

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

1. Scalability
   
   1. Extra cost and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
   2. Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
   3. Extra sharding implementations 💚
   4. Bettering effectivity of current shoppers reminiscent of geth & parity 💚💙
   5. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum 💙
   6. Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 🔥
   7. WebAssembly R&D 🔥

2. Usability
   
   1. Enhance non-public 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/person training movies 💚💙
   6. Tokenless finish person merchandise 🔥
   7. Vyper improvement 🔥
   8. Extra safety centered high-level languages 🔥

3. Safety
   
   1. Safety audits for Solidity and Vyper 💙
   2. Sensible contract audits 💚
   3. Particularly, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults 🔥
   4. Tooling that stops susceptible code 💚💙

4. Hackternships
   
   1. You have already got a job (or faculty)? No downside! Recommend an issue you wish to remedy and we’re completely happy 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 seeking to rent and fund from this pool of aspect tasks. Should you’re on the lookout for the place to start out, have a look at the listing above.)

💚– Funded in March 2018 cohort
💙– Funded in Might 2018 cohort
🔥– New to wishlist

Subsequent steps

That is an ongoing grant program, and we’d like to ask the remainder of the neighborhood to strategy us together 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
5.2.18

(Largely paraphrased from first post)