Asserting Could 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 right here for the subsequent spherical! 🦄

Background

The Ethereum venture 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 schooling. Regardless of the early promise of the ecosystem, we nonetheless have a protracted option to go, and we’re right here to work with the neighborhood to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working laborious at analysis & growth to help all the 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 may 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 bettering the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cellular 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 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 want to remind ourselves of how the Ethereum venture started: passionate open-source builders contributing to the venture on their spare time. In that spirit, we’ve begun a “hackternship” grant for neighborhood members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect venture.

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 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 it will present tight suggestions loops for impression to the ecosystem.

Grantee Checklist: 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.

Common 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 Steadiness.io) – $150K.  Interoperability for net dapps and cellular wallets.

iOS Dev Package (by Ackee) – $50K. iOS + Ethereum starter venture (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 Basis – $1M. So far, the Ethereum Basis has supported ENS by way of hiring builders internally, however now ENS is mature sufficient to develop into its personal unbiased group. We’re excited to proceed working with this nice venture/crew going ahead.

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

Belief Pockets – $30K. Open-source cellular pockets.

Safety:

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

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

SecureEth – $30K. Good 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 language 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 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 present purchasers corresponding to geth & parity 💚💙
   5. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum 💙
   6. Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 🔥
   7. WebAssembly R&D 🔥

2. Usability
   
   1. Enhance personal 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 schooling movies 💚💙
   6. Tokenless finish person merchandise 🔥
   7. Vyper growth 🔥
   8. Extra safety targeted high-level languages 🔥

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

4. Hackternships
   
   1. You have already got a job (or college)? No drawback! Counsel an issue you wish to remedy and we’re completely happy to fund a 10-week $10K externship on 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. In the event you’re searching for the place to start out, take a look at the checklist 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 method us together with your concepts (software hyperlink).

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

Greatest,
Ethereum Basis Crew
5.2.18

(Largely paraphrased from first submit)