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 undertaking seeks to assist helpful dapps and good contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the objective 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 option to go, and we’re right here to work with the group to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gas the groups working exhausting at analysis & growth to assist the complete ecosystem and assist make Ethereum extra scalable, helpful and safe. These initiatives haven’t any ICOs, no token gross sales, and focus merely on constructing helpful merchandise and experiences.

Scalability will 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 bettering the developer expertise (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, cell SDKs) or the consumer expertise. Safety can vary from auditing present contracts to offering instruments that forestall 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 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 group members that suggest an impactful Ethereum aspect undertaking.

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 further funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved. We consider this can present tight suggestions loops for influence to the ecosystem.

Grantee Record: 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 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 shopper incentivization.

BrowsEth – $25K. Typescript library for browsers.

#buidl grants**:

ENS Foundation – $1M. Up to now, the Ethereum Basis has supported ENS by way of hiring builders internally, however now ENS is mature sufficient to turn out to be 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 cell 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 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 tip consumer (“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. Enhancing effectivity of present shoppers comparable to geth & parity 💚💙
   5. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum 💙
   6. Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 🔥
   7. WebAssembly R&D 🔥

2. Usability
   
   1. Enhance non-public 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 🔥

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 forestalls weak code 💚💙

4. Hackternships
   
   1. You have already got a job (or college)? No drawback! Recommend an issue you need to resolve and we’re blissful to fund a 10-week $10K externship on your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. 💚💙(Profitable initiatives will probably be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally trying 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.)

💚– 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 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 Group
5.2.18

(Principally paraphrased from first post)