Announcing May 2018 Cohort of EF Grants

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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 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 an extended method to go, and we’re right here to work with the group to drive concrete progress.

These grants will gasoline the groups working onerous at analysis & improvement to help your entire 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 may 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 forestall 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 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 group members that suggest an impactful Ethereum facet venture.

What we offer for grantees

Non-dilutive funding
Technical advisory
Connection to extra customers
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 it will present tight suggestions loops for affect 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. 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 Package (by Ackee) – $50K. iOS + Ethereum starter venture (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. Thus far, the Ethereum Basis has supported ENS through hiring builders internally, however now ENS is mature sufficient to change 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 functions in these areas:

Scalability
1. Extra cost and/or state channels implementations 💚💙
2. Extra plasma implementations 💚💙
3. Extra sharding implementations 💚
4. Enhancing effectivity of present shoppers corresponding to geth & parity 💚💙
5. A tokenless “Lightning Community” for Ethereum 💙
6. Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 🔥
7. WebAssembly R&D 🔥
Usability
1. Enhance non-public 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 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 stops susceptible code 💚💙
Hackternships
1. You have already got a job (or faculty)? No drawback! Recommend an issue you need to resolve and we’re completely happy 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 seeking to rent and fund from this pool of facet initiatives. If you happen to’re in search of the place to begin, have a look at the listing above.)