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 mission seeks to help 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 approach 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 help the complete 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 will be within the type of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with present groups or by yourself. It can 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 stop error-prone programming patterns to contributing to different second-layer languages that concentrate on safety. We’re additionally starting to interact 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 want to remind ourselves of how the Ethereum mission started: passionate open-source builders contributing to the mission on their spare time. In that spirit, we’ve begun a “hackternship” grant for group members that suggest an impactful Ethereum facet mission.

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 consider this may present tight suggestions loops for influence to the ecosystem.

Grantee Checklist: 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. 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 mission (MVVM help).

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

vipnode – $35K. Mild consumer 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 mission/crew 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 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 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 fee and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
   2. Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
   3. Extra sharding implementations 💚
   4. Bettering effectivity of present shoppers resembling 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 / consumer 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 improvement 🔥
   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 stops susceptible code 💚💙

4. Hackternships
   
   1. You have already got a job (or college)? No drawback! Counsel an issue you wish to clear up and we’re completely satisfied to fund a 10-week $10K externship to your spare-time engaged on Ethereum. 💚💙(Profitable tasks shall be featured at a developer convention. We’re additionally seeking to rent and fund from this pool of facet tasks. In case you’re in search of the place to begin, have a look at the listing 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 help you. Thanks for constructing!

Greatest,
Ethereum Basis Staff
5.2.18

(Principally paraphrased from first post)