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 assist 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 an extended strategy to go, and we’re right here to work with the group to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working laborious at analysis & improvement to assist the whole 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 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 shoppers. Usability is for enhancing 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 various second-layer languages that target safety. We’re additionally starting to have interaction with the product/design group to assist clear up 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 group members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect challenge.

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 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 imagine this can 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. 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 Balance.io) – $150K. Interoperability for internet dapps and cellular wallets.

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

EtherKit (by vault.io) – $50K. iOS improvement 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 grow 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 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 wish 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. Enhancing effectivity of present shoppers similar to geth & parity ????????
5. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum ????
6. Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts ????
7. WebAssembly R&D ????
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 ????
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 weak code ????????
Hackternships
1. You have already got a job (or faculty)? No drawback! Recommend an issue you need to clear up and we’re pleased to fund a 10-week $10K externship on your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. ????????(Profitable initiatives will likely be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally seeking to rent and fund from this pool of aspect initiatives. If you happen to’re searching for the place to start out, take a look at the checklist above.)