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 assist 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 schooling. 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 arduous at analysis & growth to assist your complete 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 could be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with present groups or by yourself. It may also be within the type of optimizing geth/parity or constructing alternate purchasers. Usability is for enhancing the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cell SDKs) or the person expertise. Safety can vary from auditing present contracts to offering instruments that stop 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 want 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 facet 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 this can present tight suggestions loops for influence 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. Fee 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 net dapps and cell wallets.
iOS Dev Equipment (by Ackee) – $50K. iOS + Ethereum starter undertaking (MVVM assist).
EtherKit (by vault.io) – $50K. iOS growth framework (Swift).
vipnode – $35K. Mild consumer incentivization.
BrowsEth – $25K. Typescript library for browsers.
#buidl grants**:
ENS Foundation – $1M. To this point, 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 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. Sensible contract formal verification R&D.
SecureEth – $30K. Sensible contract growth 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 tip person (“helpful” for customers).
Wishlist for future grants
In future rounds of grants, we want to see extra purposes in these areas:
- Scalability
- Extra cost and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
- Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
- Extra sharding implementations 💚
- Bettering effectivity of present purchasers akin to geth & parity 💚💙
- A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum 💙
- Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 🔥
- WebAssembly R&D 🔥
- Usability
- Enhance personal key administration and transacting in Ethereum 💚💙
- Different pockets / consumer designs 💙
- Requirements and portability between wallets 💙🔥
- Tooling that improves developer expertise 💚💙
- Improved documentation & developer/person schooling movies 💚💙
- Tokenless finish person merchandise 🔥
- Vyper growth 🔥
- Extra safety targeted high-level languages 🔥
- Safety
- Safety audits for Solidity and Vyper 💙
- Sensible contract audits 💚
- Particularly, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults 🔥
- Tooling that stops susceptible code 💚💙
- Hackternships
- You have already got a job (or faculty)? No drawback! Counsel 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 might be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally trying to rent and fund from this pool of facet tasks. If you happen to’re in search of the place to start out, have a look at the listing above.)
💚– Funded in March 2018 cohort
💙– Funded in Could 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 along with your concepts (application link).
Ethereum is constructed by the neighborhood for the neighborhood, and we’re right here to assist you. Thanks for constructing!
Finest,
Ethereum Basis Crew
5.2.18
(Principally paraphrased from first post)