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 mission seeks to help helpful dapps and good contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the aim 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 a protracted 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 & growth to help the complete ecosystem and assist make Ethereum extra scalable, helpful and safe. These initiatives don’t have 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 will also be within the type of optimizing geth/parity or constructing alternate purchasers. Usability is for bettering the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cell 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 interact with the product/design neighborhood to assist clear up product and UX design issues, together with areas like key administration, Ethereum funds UX and onboarding flows.

Lastly, we want to remind ourselves of how the Ethereum mission started: passionate open-source builders contributing to the mission on their spare time. In that spirit, we’ve begun a “hackternship” grant for neighborhood members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect mission.

What we offer for grantees

Non-dilutive funding
Technical advisory
Connection to extra customers
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 further funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved. We imagine this may present tight suggestions loops for affect to the ecosystem.

Grantee Listing: Could 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 internet dapps and cell wallets.

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

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

vipnode – $35K. Gentle consumer incentivization.

BrowsEth – $25K. Typescript library for browsers.

#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 develop into its personal impartial group. We’re excited to proceed working with this nice mission/workforce 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. Sensible contract formal verification R&D.

SecureEth – $30K. Sensible contract growth 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 person (“helpful” for customers).

Wishlist for future grants

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

Scalability
1. Extra cost and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
2. Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
3. Extra sharding implementations 💚
4. Bettering effectivity of current purchasers akin 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. Various 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 growth 🔥
8. Extra safety centered high-level languages 🔥
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 forestalls susceptible code 💚💙
Hackternships
1. You have already got a job (or faculty)? No downside! Recommend an issue you wish to clear up and we’re pleased to fund a 10-week $10K externship in your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. 💚💙(Profitable initiatives can be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally seeking to rent and fund from this pool of aspect initiatives. When you’re in search of the place to start out, have a look at the record above.)