Ethereum Foundation grant recipients announced

We are excited to share the results of the Ethereum Foundation’s first grant.

As a reminder, the Ethereum project seeks to support useful dapps and smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the Ethereum Foundation’s goal is to provide developers with best-in-class R&D, developer experience, and education. Despite the ecosystem’s initial promise, there is still a long way to go, and we are here to work with the community to make concrete progress.

These grants will fuel our teams working hard on research and development to support the entire ecosystem. Additionally, we hope that these grants will inform the community about what is missing in the ecosystem that needs more support. In other words, the Foundation exists to serve teams and individuals working to prevent tragedies on the commons.

This year, we will redouble our efforts by working with the community to make Ethereum scalable, useful, and secure. So even though this grant program was announced two months ago. Program strictly focused on scalabilityWe decided to extend our support to projects that are doing great work in a number of areas. Scalability, Usability, and Security. These projects don’t have ICOs or token sales; they simply focus on building useful products and experiences.

scalability This may take the form of implementing sharding, plasma, or state channels with an existing team or on your own. It could also be in the form of optimizing geth/parity or building a replacement client. Usefulness It is intended to experiment with new dapps that improve the developer experience (e.g. static analyzers, linters, development frameworks, mobile SDKs, documentation, Solidity/Vyper development) or provide utilities to end users. security This can range from auditing existing contracts, providing tools to prevent error-prone programming patterns, to contributing to alternative security-focused second-tier languages.

We are starting now too Join the design community Help solve product and UX design issues. For example, key management, Ethereum payment UX, and onboarding flow are all areas that need major improvement for mainstream adoption. We want to fund more design research, hire talented designers, and connect with exciting teams in the field.

Finally, we would like to recall how the Ethereum project began. open source developer Contribute to the project in your spare time. In that spirit, we have launched a “hackship” grant for community members who propose impactful Ethereum side projects.

List of winners

Here are the first Ethereum Foundation grant winners:

L4 Studies – Scalability grant – $1.5 million. State channel study.

Runtime verification – Security Grant – $500,000. Casper contract formal verification.

ETH Global – DevEx Grant* – $200,000. A world-class developer conference for Ethereum

Prism Lab – Scalability Grant – $100,000. Sharding implementation.

D.D.A. – #buidl grant** – $100K. Tokenless Decentralized Derivatives Network + State Channel R&D

Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Scalability Grant – $50,000. Sharding simulation.

Plasma Taiwan development – Scalability Grant – $25K. Plasma implementation.

Ethers.js – DevEx Grant – $25,000. Web3.js alternative.

Turbo Guess – Scalability Grant – $25K. Geth optimization.

solium – DevEx Grant – $10,000. Robust static analyzer.

Alex Komarov – Design Grant – $10K. Key Management UX Research

(anonymous) – Hackturnship – $10,000. Deterministic WebAssembly.

Ankit Raj – Hackturnship – $10,000. Writing technical documentation for Geth and Solidity.

* DevEx Grant – Improves the developer experience (“useful” for developers).

** #buidl Grant – Builds for end users (“useful” to them).

What We Offer to Granted Teams

1. non-dilutive funds
2. technical advice
3. Connect with more users
4. A platform to share your work

We hope to give the Ethereum team more runway, advice, and resources so they can focus solely on building useful products and experiences.

Additionally, many of these grants can be followed up with additional funding and/or collaboration once milestones are achieved. We believe this will provide a tight feedback loop on the impact on the ecosystem.

Wishlist for future grants

We hope to see more support in future grant rounds in the following areas:

1. scalability
   
   1. Alternative Sharding Implementation
   2. Alternative Plasma Implementations
   3. Improved efficiency for existing clients such as Geth & Parity
   4. Tokenless “Lightning Network” for Ethereum

2. Usefulness
   
   1. UX design research to improve private key management and Ethereum transactions
   2. Alternative Wallet/Client Design
   3. Tools to improve your developer experience
   4. Improved documentation and developer/user training videos

3. security
   
   1. Security Audit for Solidity and Vyper
   2. Smart contract audit
   3. Tools to prevent vulnerable code

4. “Hackingtonship”
   
   1. Do you have a job (or school)? are you okay! Suggest a problem you’d like to solve, and we’ll cover a $10,000 external internship for 10 weeks to work on Ethereum in your spare time. Successful projects will be featured at developer conferences. We are also looking to hire and fund from this pool of side projects.

next stage

This is an ongoing grants program, and we’d like to invite the rest of the community to approach us with your ideas (Application link).

Ethereum was built by the community for the community, and we are here to support you. Thanks for building it!

best,
Ethereum Foundation Team
3.7.18