Announcing May 2018 Cohort of EF Grants

Thanks all for making use of, and we’re excited to announce the most recent 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 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 schooling. Regardless of the early promise of the ecosystem, we nonetheless have a protracted technique to go, and we’re right here to work with the group to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working arduous at analysis & improvement to assist your 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 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 shoppers. 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 concentrate on 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

1. Non-dilutive funding
2. Technical advisory
3. Connection to extra customers
4. 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 it will present tight suggestions loops for influence to the ecosystem.

Grantee Listing: Might 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 net dapps and cell 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 develop into its personal unbiased group. We’re excited to proceed working with this nice challenge/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 improvement 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 person (“helpful” for customers).

Wishlist for future grants

In future rounds of grants, we wish 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 current shoppers 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 improvement 🔥
   8. Extra safety targeted high-level languages 🔥
3. 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 weak code 💚💙
4. Hackternships
   1. You have already got a job (or faculty)? No downside! Recommend an issue you need to clear up and we’re glad 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. When you’re searching for the place to begin, take a look at the listing above.)

💚– Funded in March 2018 cohort
💙– Funded in Might 2018 cohort
🔥– New to wishlist

Subsequent steps

That is an ongoing grant program, and we’d like to ask the remainder of the group to method us along with your concepts (application link).

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

Greatest,
Ethereum Basis Workforce
5.2.18

(Principally paraphrased from first post)