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

These grants will gas the groups working exhausting at analysis & improvement to help all the ecosystem and assist make Ethereum extra scalable, helpful and safe. These tasks haven’t 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 will 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, cell SDKs) or the consumer 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 interact with the product/design neighborhood 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 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 facet 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 supply 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 extra funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved. We consider it will present tight suggestions loops for affect to the ecosystem.

Grantee Record: 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.

Basic 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 venture (MVVM help).

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 venture/workforce 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 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 consumer (“helpful” for customers).

Wishlist for future grants

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

1. Scalability
   
   1. Extra fee and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
   2. Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
   3. Extra sharding implementations 💚
   4. Enhancing 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/consumer schooling movies 💚💙
   6. Tokenless finish consumer 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 college)? No downside! Counsel an issue you need to resolve and we’re glad to fund a 10-week $10K externship on your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. 💚💙(Profitable tasks might be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally trying 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 record 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 neighborhood to strategy us together with your concepts (application link).

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

Finest,
Ethereum Basis Group
5.2.18

(Largely paraphrased from first post)