Greetings from the Ethereum Foundation Grants Team!
With Devcon 4 in full swing, we’re back to announce Wave 4 of our grant program! Thank you to all our fantastic community members who submitted creative ideas on how to strengthen our ecosystem. Without the time and energy you invest in Ethereum, we wouldn’t exist. As the program continues to grow, we will continue to involve more community members in the decision-making process. Today’s grants program has improved significantly compared to earlier this year thanks to helpful feedback from the community, allowing us to provide better public tools and infrastructure.
If you haven’t heard of us before, we went in depth about the program’s history, funding summary, and process in our last presentation. Find that post hereYou can check guidelines, etc. here.
Without further ado…
๐ We are proud to announce our Wave 4 winners! ๐
scalability
- Non-custodial payment channel hubโโ$420K. Pay when shipped for open source SDK releases built by spank chain, Kyokanand connection At Devcon 4
- prototypeโโ — $375,000. Front-end status channel research and development.
- final labโโ โโ– $250,000. Development of forward lock-in contracts (FTLC).
- Kyokanโโโ โโ– $125,000. Development of a production-ready mainnet Plasma Cash & Debit plugin.
- Atomic Cross Chain Transactions — $65,000. The study was led by Maurice Herlihy of Brown University.
- EthSnarksโโ โโ– $40,000. Developed a cross-compatible SDK for zkSNARKS that can run on Ethereum.
security
- flintstone — $120,000. Further developments in the Flint Language, including a security-focused IDE developed by Susan Eisenbach at Imperial College London.
Usability (DevEx)
- TrueBlocks โโ– $120,000. Open source block explorer.
- Gitcoinโโ — $100,000. Funding Bounties for Gitcoin.
- VulcanizeDB โโ– $75,000. โCommunity Sourceโ block explorer.
- Biller โโ– $50,000. Developing a modular alternative to Truffle based on Ethers.js.
- Edikโโ — $25,000. An open source tool for configuring and interacting with smart contract codebases.
- Ethers.jsโโ — $25,000. We support ricmoo for the ongoing development and maintenance of Ethers.js.
- kauri — $25,000. Support document bounty for Kauri.
(#build)
- Magic Money Tree (Dark Crystal) — 50,000 dollars. A tool to securely store and recover keys and secrets with the Secure Scuttlebutt Team’s multi-signature design.
Hackturnship
client diversity
Want to #BUIDL with us? Check out the developer wishlist below and follow the links for more information. If you can imagine a project related to any of the topics listed, submit an application and talk to us!
Wishlist!
scalability
- Additional payment and/or status channel Implementation ๐๐๐
- more plasma Implementation ๐๐
- Improved efficiency for existing customers, etc. Guess & equal ๐๐
- Tokenless”lightning network“For Ethereum ๐
- WebAssembly Research and Development ๐ฅ
- libp2p Python implementation ๐ฅ
- Discovered Plasma Cache implementation for fungible tokens utilizing defragmentation technology here and here ๐ฅ
- Casperโs Academic Analysis ๐ฅ
seclusion
- starks Research and Development ๐ฅ
- BLS12-381 Implemented in a new language ๐ฅ
Usefulness
- Improved private key management and Ethereum transactions ๐๐๐
- Alternative Wallet/Client Design ๐๐
- standard and portability Between wallets๐
- tooling Improves your developer experience ๐๐๐๐
- Improved documentation and developer/user training videos ๐๐๐๐
- Tokenless end-user products ๐
- viper development ๐
- More focus on security high level Language ๐
- Non-transferable ID token ๐ฅ
- Setting up a specification and cross-client test suite for the JSON-RPC API ๐ฅ
- Analysis and analysis of real Ethereum transactions (application usage, gas/opcode usage, missing methods for optimization, etc.) ๐ฅ
- Tools to source-check client-side contracts, leverage metadata hashes, and display NatSpec annotations to users for use in their wallets ๐ฅ
security
- Security audit for: viper ๐๐
- Smart Contract Audit ๐๐
- Especially thanks to ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets and vaults ๐
- Tools to prevent vulnerable code ๐๐๐
- IDE with visual debugger ๐ฅ
- Privacy protection solution ๐ฅ
- More in-depth network monitoring tools ๐ฅ
education
- Community groups and conferences for underrepresented and underserved communities ๐ฅ
- Translate studies, documents and specifications into other languages โโ๐ฅ
Hackturnship
Do you already 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. ๐๐๐๐ (Successful projects will be featured at developer conferences. We are also looking to hire and fund this pool of side projects. If you’re looking for where to start, see the list above.)
๐ — Wave I / ๐ — Wave II / ๐ — Wave III / ๐– Wave IV / ๐ฅ — Added to wishlist
For more inspiration…
Stay informed with research here and here.