Announcing the Recipients of the Ethereum Foundation Grant

We’re excited to share the outcomes of the primary wave of grants from the Ethereum Basis.

As a reminder, the Ethereum Challenge seeks to assist helpful dapps and sensible contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the Ethereum Basis goals 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 group to make concrete progress.

These grants will energize the laborious working R&D groups to assist the complete ecosystem. Moreover, we hope that these grants will sign to the group what we expect are lacking components of the ecosystem that want extra assist. Put one other approach, the Basis is right here to serve the groups and people who’re working to stop tragedy for the frequent folks.

This 12 months, we are going to double down on working with the group to make Ethereum scalable, helpful and safe. By the best way, though this grant program was introduced two months in the past strictly scalability-focused programWe determined to increase assist to initiatives which are doing nice Scalability, Usability and Safety, These initiatives haven’t any ICOs, no token gross sales, and are solely centered on constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.

scalability Could be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with present groups or by yourself. This might be within the type of customizing the gate/parity and even creating an alternate shopper. utility Is it to enhance the developer expertise (eg static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cellular SDKs, documentation, Solidity/Viper improvement) or to experiment with new dapps that present utility to the tip person. Safety This may vary from auditing present contracts to offering instruments that forestall error-prone programming patterns, to contributing to different second-layer languages ​​that target safety.

we’re additionally beginning Join 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 enhancements for mainstream adoption. We wish to fund extra design research on this space, rent gifted designers and join with thrilling groups.

Lastly, we would prefer to remind ourselves how the Ethereum challenge started: Passionate open-source builders Contributing to the challenge in his spare time. In that spirit, we have launched a “Hackternship” grant for group members to suggest an impactful Ethereum facet challenge.

listing of award winners

Listed here are the inaugural Ethereum Basis grant winners:

L4 Analysis – Scalability Grant – $1.5M. State Channel Analysis.

runtime verification – Safety Grant – $500K. Casper contract formal verification.

ETHGlobal – DevX Grant* – $200K. World Class Developer Convention for Ethereum

Prismatic Labs – Scalability Grant – $100K. sharing implementation.

D.D.A – #Biddle Grant** – $100K. Tokenless Decentralized Derivatives Community + State Channel R&D

Barcelona Supercomputing Middle – Scalability Grant – $50K. sharing emulation.

Plasma Taiwan Dev – Scalability Grant – $25K. plasma implementation.

ether.js – DevEx Grant – $25K. Web3.js different.

turbo geth – Scalability Grant – $25K. Geth Customization.

solium – DevX Grant – $10K. Solidity Static Analyzer.

alex komarov – Design Grant – $10K. Main Administration UX Research

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

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

* DevX Grants – Improves the developer expertise (“Helpful” for builders).

** #buidl grant – builds for the tip person (“helpful” for customers).

What we provide for groups that win grants

1. non-dilutive funding
2. technical recommendation
3. Join with extra customers
4. platform to share your work

We sit up for offering Ethereum groups with extra runway, mentorship and sources to deal with constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.

As well as, many of those grants will be prolonged with further funding and/or assist when milestones are achieved. We consider this can present a tighter suggestions loop for influence on the ecosystem.

want listing for future grants

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

1. scalability
   
   1. elective sharding implementation
   2. different plasma implementation
   3. Bettering the effectivity of present purchasers like Geth and Parity
   4. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum.

2. utility
   
   1. UX Design Examine to Enhance Personal Key Administration and Transactions in Ethereum
   2. Different Pockets/Shopper Design
   3. Tooling that improves the developer expertise
   4. Higher documentation and developer/person training movies

3. Safety
   
   1. Safety audit for Solidity and Viper
   2. smart contract audit
   3. Tooling that forestalls unsafe code

4. “Hackturnship”
   
   1. Do you may have a job (or college)? No downside! Recommend an issue you need to resolve and we’ll be pleased to fund a 10-week $10K externship in your spare time engaged on Ethereum. Profitable initiatives will probably be showcased on the Developer Convention. We’re additionally hiring and funding from this pool of facet initiatives.

subsequent steps

That is an ongoing grant program, and we would like to ask the remainder of the group to contact us with their concepts (utility hyperlink,

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

Finest,
Ethereum Basis Workforce
3.7.18