Announcing May 2018 Cohort of EF Grants

Advertise here

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 help helpful dapps and sensible 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 method to go, and we’re right here to work with the neighborhood to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working onerous at analysis & growth to help your entire 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 might be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with current 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 consumer expertise. Safety can vary from auditing current contracts to offering instruments that forestall error-prone programming patterns to contributing to various second-layer languages that concentrate on safety. We’re additionally starting to interact 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 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 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 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.

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 cellular wallets.

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

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

vipnode – $35K. Mild shopper 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 turn into its personal impartial group. We’re excited to proceed working with this nice undertaking/group 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 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 top consumer (“helpful” for customers).

Wishlist for future grants

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

Scalability
1. Extra fee and/or state channels implementations
2. Extra plasma implementations
3. Extra sharding implementations
4. Bettering effectivity of current purchasers similar 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 / shopper designs
3. Requirements and portability between wallets
4. Tooling that improves developer expertise
5. Improved documentation & developer/consumer training movies
6. Tokenless finish consumer 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 drawback! Recommend an issue you wish to remedy and we’re joyful to fund a 10-week $10K externship in your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. (Profitable tasks will probably be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally seeking to rent and fund from this pool of facet tasks. In case you’re searching for the place to begin, take a look at the checklist above.)